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If this is a real problem you have, and not just a thought experiment, I think rather than burying the data on some unreliable medium, your best bet is to just pay someone to store it for you offshore, away from the dictatorship you mentioned.
There are plenty of consumer-grade cloud storage services. I'm sure there are more niche ones specifically for long-term archival as well, which would usually be cheaper per bit, per-year, if you don't need to access the data regularly.
So much data has already been lost due to bitrot caused by magnetic loss and plastic breakdown. Most consumer grade storage will break down and start to lose data within a decade. Even if the data survives, will the operating system and software be available in the future to read the media? Surprisingly, the best way to preserve data long term is to print it on paper. Or write it to a gold record and send it into space.
The english wikipedia is only 100GB, so its easy to fit on digital storage, but printing it on paper is gonna take a whole building of physical space to even fit it.
I’d go with optical media here. Probably multiple capsules.
~~This is terrible advice.~~ Most writable DVDs degrade quickly, even if they're stored away from sunlight and heat. Every single one of my burned DVDs from more than a few years back is completely unreadable.
Update: I missed the very important line about M-DISC. This is critical. I can't vouch for M-DISC personally, but most other optical media is garbage for archival purposes.
Do you remember what kind they were? For awhile they made them with organic dyes and those died quickly. I believe they stopped producing those, and the inorganic ones are supposed to be much better.
Yes, they were organic dyes. At the time, those were the only kind. Maybe it's gotten better over the years.
No way. Optical media suffer bitrot at a high rate compared to magnetic media. And the means to read it are quickly going obsolete.
It’s pretty dependent on humidity and temperature, so a DVD buried in a well sealed plastic bag with a desiccant pack is actually in good conditions. No light, generally cool, and low humidity are perfect.
A hard drive has a lot of moving parts that must work and are basically impossible to replace. With optical media you’re just storing the platters, and I’m sure you’ll still be able to track down a drive somewhere. You can still find VHS players and those have been obsolete for 25 years.
My take -- OP is an anti-authoritarian time traveler. Go get em! I hope your data stays safe.
P.s. - want to drop me some winning lottery numbers? My dms are open
i think your best bet would just be to brute force it: get a bunch of different media (usb-drives, CDs, hard drives, whatever you can get your hands on and ideally from different brands) and just put the same data on all of them, then wrap in a series of plastic bags that you try to put a vacuum on, put in the most durable water and ideally airtight container you can get your hands on, then again wrap that in some plastic bags because why not.
Then bury all that as deep as you can and surround it in rocks, especially i think you'll want a bunch of rocks on top of it. And for extra points repeat all this as many times as possible in different locations.
All this is just to compound the chances that at least one of the copies of the data will survive, and even if that fails you'll hopefully end up with enough data being intact across the different storage mediums that you can piece the data together somehow, i'm not sure how precisely you'd do that but it's at least possible to figure out so long as the data is there.
There definitely is an advantage to different media types. Each technology has their own limitations. Tape back up, SSD, USB drive, DVD and HD with spinning platers
SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.
SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.
Huh? Why? Should SSDs not be able to contain data without power?
That's one of the downsides of SSDs, you lose data really fast without power. Like, after a year, your data will almost sure not be intact.
Flash memory stores data as a voltage level, with different values being a tiny distance apart. The voltage slowly leaks out of the cells and has to be periodically topped off.
No, they'll start to corrupt within a year or two. They need to be powered to retain data.
After 30 years you can forget it.
Sadly, no.
There was a recent paper on this. The failure rate was higher than expected. You'll have to search for it; I didn't save a link.
Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.
That's why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.
A raid6 array across a collection of separate disks might do it.
If it's small you might try printing the files on archival paper with archival ink. Then you can put copies in multiple safe deposit boxes. Also you could bury copies rolled up in plastic water bottles. I think those are unlikely to degrade anytime soon. Or glass bottles with plastic lids.
so, I would suggest talking with an archivist. Many libraries will have archivists on the payroll (Or know one, anyways) and they'd likely be happy to talk about archival methods.
personally, what I would do- and I make no guarantees that it will work for a decade- is to seal the hard drive (or whatever media,) inside a vacuum bag with a shitload of silica desiccant gel. maybe double bag it with even more silica gel, then place it inside a pelican case. if you double bag, splurge on the indicator stuff and let it sit for a week.
but I'm not an archivist, and they may laugh at my suggestion.
Don't bury it. And don't count on ten years. Thirty years guarantees the media won't be physically compatible with future devices. How would you read a floppy disk from 1995 today? You'd be able to find a USB floppy drive, probably, online. Good luck having the disk be in a format that a modern OS understands. You'd need specialty software for that.
Get two spinning disk drives from major brands like Western Digital or Toshiba (not Seagate, for sure). Get different brands to reduce risk of failure from a manufacturing issue (as in, two from the same batch are likely to have the same failure if there was a production issue).
Send one somewhere abroad where it can be stored in a safe deposit box (hopefully, you know someone who lives in a free-er country). Plan to exchange it with a freshly written drive every three years. Go back and forth like this, completely rewriting the data each time to minimize the chances of bit-rot (look up this term to understand why you're rewriting and exchanging the drives).
This will also address files formats that evolve and eventually become incompatible with future software (thinking proprietary things, not plain text, jpegs, or standardized media files). I did something similar having a family member store music that I recorded (my own, not ripped CDs) in a different state in case of natural disaster at home.
All of this can be done pretty cheap. $200 bucks should cover both drives and at least a couple of years of physical storage at a bank. International shipping will probably be the biggest cost, especially over time.
All modern OSs can read fat16 or fat32, not sure what you think floppy disks used.
FAT12, and no it doesn't work natively. I know this because I had to replace a floppy to fix a 40 year old computer earlier this year.
You can get a USB 3.5" floppy drive working with just some special software, but a 5.25" FDD was a huge pain involving open source hardware (greaseweazle) that reads the raw magnetic flux values that then have to be run through another janky piece of software to interpret it.
Not difficult, or even expensive, to find a working 20 year old machine with a 3.5" FDD. Also I work at a library and we keep a couple of well bagged USB floppy drives around for profs who occasionally need data retrieval. Hasn't happened in a couple years though. We also have an old Dell for 5.25".
Or just let it go. Enjoy the present and realize you can't predict the future.
Any situation when an arrangement like this becomes useful, means you'll have much worse and much more important things to concern yourself with.
Probably want to encode it on a WORM tape. (Suggestion used LTO drives on eBay)
Then store it in the centre of a sealed medium ~~iron~~ galvanized metal box filled with silica. (Take care not to damage the tape, without trapping moisture.)
I'd imagine it would work well if you can keep the hardware to use it functional.
Hell, encode it into stone tablets. Those would last forever, but read time would be awful.
"Bring me the tablet"
"No, not the ipad, the stone tablet that I buried underground"
Oops, I found the wrong tablet and invented Mormonism instead. Sorry.
Drop a thumb stick (mechanical failure) into a plastic zip-lock in a vacuum (oxygen) then into a metal thermos mug with water (pressure and radiation) then dig it really deep (accidential discovery and weather). By the time it deteriorates you'd have problems finding USB interfaces to plug it in. The location itself is largely irrelevant, but I'd recommend some place far from human-occupied places.
The authoritarian state problem isn't solveable, but you can defend it by obscurity, like not leaving a trace of thinking about this info cache, or leaving too many of these caches to reliably dig up all of them.
flash storage does degrade though, sure it's presumably slowed down by a stable environment without oxygen, but i can't imagine it lasting more than 50 years
If it's a Type-A, add a little Type-A to Type-C converter in the bag as well. Just in case.