I don't know exactly what is meant by eventuality of digital book
burning, but here's my opinion on the nuts and bolts of protecting your
data:
Prudent data backup/retention of digital data requires two key concepts:
1. Store data in a system that is self-healing.
In other words, if there is bit rot or other kinds of storage medium
malfunction, will the system detect it and repair the data?
Examples: rsbep, BTRFS and ZFS (Note: not the same as RAID, nor SMART)
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/
[Search domain users.softlab.ntua.gr]
users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/rsbep.html
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rsbep%20site%3Ausers.softlab.ntua.grhttp://users.softlab.ntua.gr/%7Ettsiod/rsbep.html
2. Store copies of the data in multiple locations
Whether the threat is from earthquakes, fire, hurricane, civil unrest,
theft, or digital book burning, keep copies in multiple secure
locations. I'd recommend having one copy far away from where you live
and work; out of region. Encryption of these data would be a good idea
to give you peace of mind that you are not extending your attack surface
with all of these copies. Of course, then you need a separate backup
system for your encryption keys. :-)
--
The ideal storage medium is a very controversial topic. It seems that
for small operators tape backups are not a good option in terms of cost
and upkeep. Optical discs are much more fragile than what they were
believed to be, and won't last more than ten years (see link below). For
backups, spinning disks seem to be the best bet for now. For archiving,
store the archives in a self-healing system on disk, and keep the disks
offline (i.e., cold storage). You will probably want to spin up the
archive disks at least once every one to two years, to allow for the
self-healing system to do its job, and to detect catastrophic disk
failures (which will happen around year 5 to 7).
http://www.wbur.org/npr/340716269/how-long-do-cds-last-it-depends-but-definitely-not-forever
For items that you truly want to last for decades or even centuries,
print it out using high-quality ink on archival paper. There are
programs to print out documents with error-correcting codes on each
line, which kind of gives you concept #1 from above. Dried 2D pulp
technology has been proven effective based on millenia of testing, as
opposed to our current unreliable digital media.
---
This is of course a gross simplification. I'd be curious to hear other
opinions as well.
Cheers,
~Tomer
On 8/24/14 10:22 AM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 05:24:49AM +, g...@i2pmail.org wrote 1.1K bytes
in 0 lines about:
: There is a lot of history loss going on, despite backups. I've had
Sorry you've learned the hard way about the difference between backups
and archiving. Most of us have learned this the same way.
: Are there any software projects are out there to resist an eventuality
: of digital book burning?
Fine places to start are https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Archive-It
and http://longserver.org/
Or maybe the NSA or GCHQ has it all. ;)
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