Like I’d imagine there’s gonna be a lot of rain over time if I want this time capsule to last like idk 10 years? 30 years?
Is there like a box so tough its indestructible?
Can animals dig it up if I bury it?
How deep do it bury it?
Is the earth’s magnetism gonna affect the hard drive? (Or is there a better medium?)
Like I want this to be like very low budget, I don’t have millions to build an actual timecapsule like some organizations have done. Is there some cheap box that’s waterproof to protect a hard drive from damage for like 30 years buried in the ground?
No way. Optical media suffer bitrot at a high rate compared to magnetic media. And the means to read it are quickly going obsolete.
That’s what the m-disk is for I assume.
I wouldn’t trust that either.
It’s specifically what they’re for. They’re designed for archival purposes.
You can spiral off into techno-paranoia if you like, but that’s just going to lead you to the conclusion that there are no solutions and nothing can be done. OP’s looking for actual solutions so that’s not helpful here.
I’m sorry, did I not provide a workable solution using magnetic media and periodic writes of new data? There’s nothing paranoid about that. It’s smart archiving.
You can spiral off into portraying my common-sense solution as hyperbolic bullshit, but that’s just going to lead me to the conclusion that you didn’t read or comprehend my recommendation. I provided an actual solution and what you said isn’t helpful.
That’s true, but for obvious reasons that hasn’t been fully tested yet. Still, for just 10-30 years, it should probably work. Certainly better than a hard drive.
There are ways to artificially “age” media by accelerating the sorts of degradation pathways they’d be experiencing naturally during storage in normal conditions.
M-Disks are rated for one thousand years. Unlike other writable optical meida it doesn’t use an organic substrate. It’s carbon glass, very stable.
What’s awesome is that no one alive today can disprove their marketing. I’ll stick with the tech that we’ve been using for decades. You know, the one about which we have lots of data how it performs and degrades. Because we’ve manufactured hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of them. How many people do you know using M-DISCs and how many of them have had them for decades? I can answer the second part: zero, as they came to market in 2009.
!remindme 1000 years
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.