Ask HN: How would you store 5TB of data for 50 years, untouched?

Alternatively burn a 100 or so Blu-rays and get two Blu-ray readers (one on a mobile device) other an external reader that you will attach to the aforementioned desktop.

Or who knows, maybe holographic storage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage) will come around finally and store the 5TB in a toothpick sized gizmo (which might probably run 512 cores of Googple's Chip (in my alternate reality, Google and Apple merge and buy Intel)...

Removing that constraint and completely ignoring cost I'd also setup a low-risk savings account with $1M in it and put the data on S3 and Rackspace Cloud. I'd store access credentials in the capsule. Odds are pretty good one of those 2 will be around in 50 years (and you'll have a chunk of money left over in interest).

Try to keep everything ASCII, with really good text descriptions of data formats.

Realistically 50 years is not a long time: I would bet we'll still have legacy access to USB, SATA, and probably ext3 & NTFS (though probably not IDE). Tons of computer folk who used these technologies will still be alive to work them. English will still be the primary language in the US.

An interesting problem is what to do when the timescale allows these things to change. What if nobody remembers USB, or what spinning platters are. Or the English language?

Ideally some kind of artificial intelligence would come about sometime in the future to assume the role of data keeper - hiring people to do any work it couldn't do from within the computer and running off some kind of fund that had been set up. Maybe one day there will be a market for creating intelligent services like this, I hope I have something to do with them.

Start by looking at these guys: http://www.falconrak.com/pro_archival_cd-r_gold_ep.html

Optical media is the only way to guarantee whichever future "creatures" encounter the data, can actually figure out how to access it.

If you are a blind alien (so that you do not understand the _concept of light_) you can potentially still have measuring equipment that can sense the pits in the media and make sense out of the binary data.

If so, you could maybe give use some more information on the constraints involved(although i must admit thinking about it without any constraints is fun, too)

Assuming there is no cost limit here, I would go one step further and say use some form of metal. Say stainless steel, aluminum, gold, or titanium. Some metal that is very stable over time and does not interact with the atmosphere readily. Again, use micro-abrasion / carving technology to write data to the materials.

The next question is what format for the data? It depends on whats being stored. The biggest issue is that of "formats".

Lets look at things that last a long time. The English(or any language) is unlikely to change that much in 50, 100, or even 200 years. Words and their meanings will change, but for the most part a native English speaker 200 years from now could read what we write now. Whether or not they understand the usage of the language is a different question. So if its a textual document you're saving, write it in plain English. No abbreviations, etc.

What about media? That gets complicated. If its a static image, perhaps keeping it simple is best. In plain English, write that the following section of data is an image. Each group of three numbers starts at 0 through 255. In procession from left-to-right, the values represent Red, Green, and Blue. Each group of 3 numbers is what we called a "pixel". The image is 300 pixels wide, and 800 pixels heigh(arbitrary numbers for this argument).

For moving images, further expand on the single image description and say every 24 images should be spaced equally and viewed over the course of 1 second to achieve animation.

Sound is something I don't know anything about from a data format perspective, but I would again find the simplest mechanical way to produce a sound and store it in that format with ample verbage describing how to handle it.

Edit After reading other responses that came in while I was writing this, I want to add some more thoughts.

Remember that our technology is ephemeral. We don't really use much tech from 50 years ago, hardly any from 100 years ago, and it just gets worse from there.

Things like microfiche, ssd's, cd-roms, blue-ray, etc are all the more bad ideas for long-term backup. Paper books are a better option than any of these for near-term storage for time periods up to 50 years.

If we want to actually store data in a meaningful way for long periods of time, say over 100 years, we have to keep it simple. Your devices will probably not last 100 years, even if kept in storage under the most secure environment. But in 100 years people will still have eyes, ears, and hands.

We have to look back over history and look at the material types that survive long periods. Stone, and metal to an extent, are very good long-term materials. Cloth and paper are not*. DNA is potentially a usable data store, but is corruptible. Plus you can't read DNA patterns with the eye.

If 1MB is too much, try 1KB, and repeat for 5 billion people. There should still be some people left for systems maintenance.

For preservation, encode the data in the DNA of a bacterium, replicate it massively and put them in some kind of suspended animation (hand waving wildly).

Getting the meaning of the data is another matter. I wonder whether it will be possible to create species of bacteria that can decode the above DNA and present it directly accessible to human senses - ex: bacteria that change color, form shapes, etc.

How would you store an ever-increasing amount of digital data indefinitely?

1. Get a 9600 bps modem. Use it to encode your data, and record the output as an audio file.

2. Take this audio file, and split it up into 60 minute segments.

3. Record these 60 minute segments onto two-sided vinyl LPs, 30 minutes per side. This will take about a million LPs.

4. Print on acid-free paper, using ink that will survive 50 years too, instructions on how a 9600 bps modem works. Describe the encoding in detail, sufficient so that someone using the equivalent of MATLAB or Mathematica or something 50 years from now on the computers they will have then could easily write a program to decode a modem signal.

5. Also print and include instructions for making a record player. As with the modem, the important part is describing how the signal is encoded on the LP. They'll have no trouble building a record player 50 years from now. (Assuming they don't just photograph the LPs with the 3D terapixel camera on their iPhone 54, and then write an app to extract the signal from the photo...)

5. Store all of this somewhere. LPs will last 50 years easily in a typical office environment, so you probably don't have to resort to something like a hermetically sealed vault buried in an old salt mine or anything extreme like that.