Back up your precious files on ordinary paper

by adulau • 14 years ago

193 91 14 years ago

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

And printing in just 3-tone color potentially increases the information density by a factor of 8.

SonicSoul• 14 years ago

... at a cost of durability. Tho some sort of error recovery algorithm (along the lines of parity archive) could be used.. adding redundancy at a lower rate than what is gained from additional colors..

duaneb• 14 years ago

Color might be useful as redundancy: For example, one could read the data into HSV; the bit being stored could be replicated three times, once in Hue, once in Saturation, and once in Value. I'm not sure how practical this actually is, especially on the radical end of those values. Also, this kind of redundancy doesn't help against coffee spills, just printing errors, and not even well against those.

jws• 14 years ago

Three color will take three times as many bits as input and store three times as many bits. Each pixel cell will have eight possible values, but that is just three times the information.

gus_massa• 14 years ago

The color of the ink usually changes much faster, so it could be a problem to try to read it later. If the information is stored digitally, probably it is still possible to read it with the right calibration. But if the information is stored analogously it is really a big problem: for example http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html

trebor3• 14 years ago

I can imagine how difficult source control would be when using paper: "Hey Fred, I need sheet 7 thru 9 from revision 2.6.3!" "Which filing cabinet is it in?"

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

So a bit like backup tapes, then? ;)

trebor3• 14 years ago

Yup, like a cassette with its tape spilling out. Just imagine dropping the sheaf of papers on your way to the scanner!

tcarnell2• 14 years ago

You could even implement raid striping! For extra security and store the 'stripes' in different filing cabinets!

trebor3• 14 years ago

You could cheaply achieve RAID-6 this way! But data throughput might be abysmally slow though... so don't use it for servers. ;)

mxey• 14 years ago

Similar project: https://github.com/penma/dpaper

femto• 14 years ago

And this: http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

Checkout the nice picture on their home page: http://twibright.com/ :-)

darkstalker• 14 years ago

I heard someone did this years ago, but with the intention of sending files via fax

e1ven• 14 years ago

Do you recall the name of the project? I'm very interested in finding alternative implementations of this.

nodata• 14 years ago

This is similar to "Paperkey - an OpenPGP key archiver": http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/

miahi• 14 years ago

Dan has a nice article about this: http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm

tcarnell2• 14 years ago

Surely if you can use colour aswell you could store LOADS more data per A4 sheet than 80 Meg...

pavel_lishin2• 14 years ago

I would be worried about yellow inks fading into white.

pattern• 14 years ago

No one ever said yellow :) Cyan/Magenta/Green or any other trio of darker and differentiated colors may be able to do the trick.

rm999• 14 years ago

Good idea, but that may introduce some really thorny issues with color calibration.

mjn• 14 years ago

Also, potential data-corruption issues with color laser printers that add spurious yellow watermarking dots [1], though perhaps a sufficiently robust error-correction scheme would be able to work around that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

mherdeg• 14 years ago

Does anyone have a PDF of the source code? (Edit: well, good luck, folks: http://web.mit.edu/~mherdeg/www/paperbak.pdf)

DLWormwood• 14 years ago

This encoding system kind of reminds me of how the Nintendo eReader worked... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader

cianclarke• 14 years ago

Please tell me this is a troll? I mean, I know the author acknowledges the fact this is completely unnecessary, but still - I'm no environmentalist, but this seems to be an incredibly silly idea..

DanBC• 14 years ago

Less of a troll and more of a playful look at barcode style systems, including byte encoding, compression, error correction, format limitations,etc.

As the author says it's useful for a small number of very important files.

vidarh• 14 years ago

The very first line of the page introduces it as a joke

wtvanhest2• 14 years ago

Good catch, I didn't notice that at all.

cantrevealname• 14 years ago

The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

I looked at the source code. It's 5,575 lines of original C code. (I excluded the AES encryption, bzip2, Reed-Solomon, and CRC16 source code from my count.)

I imagine that he wrote the words "open source joke" as a defense mechanism against people who would mock his efforts with lines like "please tell me this is a troll", "that is completely unnecessary", and "an incredibly silly idea".

Lots of people make self-effacing remarks when they introduce a work that they know will draw criticism: "It's just a first draft, it needs a lot more work." "I hacked it up during lunch [when it really took two weeks]." Etc.

ehutch79• 14 years ago

i thought we were supposed to be scanning all our important documents and shredding them?

roqetman• 14 years ago

I guess this would be useful in the case of an apocalypse scenario involving mass EM pulses (assuming anyone is still around to build new computers with OCR to reload the code). Better use good acid-fee paper stored at near-vacuum though.

happywolf• 14 years ago

If I can find a computer survived the EM pulses to scan the paper, then most likely I don't need this paper back up anyway. On the other hand if all my data is dead upon the EM pulses attack, I won't put too much faith on the chance of getting hold of any surviving computer.

politician• 14 years ago

Well, you could house your precious scanner in a Faraday cage along with a RepRap and other "reboot the world" tech.

Jaecen• 14 years ago

EM would not erase optical media like CD's either.

thebigshane4• 14 years ago

No, instead those degrade naturally on their own.

"CD-Rs are expected to have an average life expectancy of 10 years" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Expected_lifespan

CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer -- http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/temp-opmedi...

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

"bitmaps produced by PaperBack are also human-readable (with the small help of any decent microscope). I'm joking"

Actually, tiny human-readable text is incredibly useful for verifying the data was backed up correctly (at least for text-based files). I read about this paper backup technique a while ago, and that was touted as one of the main benefits.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Sounds like microfiche

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

True, the one I read about was paper based though, from a regular printer I believe.

gmaslov• 14 years ago

Reminds me of a proposal I read about once for a time capsule -- the kind intended to survive the fall of civilization and to help reboot it. It would be plain human-readable text and diagrams engraved into a hard disc of some stable material, starting out big and legible at the edges and gradually getting smaller and smaller as it spirals towards the center, until it's microscopic.

The text would start out as a Rosetta Stone type of thing, to try to establish a common language. Then as it got smaller, it would describe how to grind a hand lens so you can read further. Then even smaller text describes how to build a microscope. Maybe somewhat further on it talks about CD-ROM drives, and eventually transitions to /that/ format...

dandelany• 14 years ago

You're probably thinking of the Rosetta Project: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

...I always thought it was a very cool idea too.

loceng• 14 years ago

I just thought about this today. Worse case scenarios don't seem probable, though how devastated and delayed would life become if it did happen?

slantyyz2• 14 years ago

I don't know how many people remember this, but this reminds me of a technology in the mid-to-early 80s where computer magazines offered a gigantic QR-like code that could be scanned (if you bought the device) so that you wouldn't have to spend any time typing in the BASIC source code.

Gormo• 14 years ago

Oscar Databar: http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/oscar/oscar.html

Software was published via standard one-dimensional bar codes, and instead of typing in the code from a book or magazine, you'd manually scan line after line of barcodes using a specially designed hand scanner.

slantyyz2• 14 years ago

That's a good find. The one I was thinking about that appeared in Apple ][ mags was the Cauzin Softstrip:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip

raverbashing• 14 years ago

This reminds me of one thing

There was this small Casio musical keyboard at home, bought in the 80s (made in Japan I think)

It came with a scanning pen, you could scan a song (from a book) made up of several barcodes (just like the links posted here) and it would play the song.

kabdib• 14 years ago

Baking informaiton into clay tablets isprobably the best bit-per-year-of-rentention technique that mankind has invented. Not sure what's second best -- ink on archival paper?

[I don't count the recordings attached to the Voyager probes. We can't easily retrieve those.]

aristus• 14 years ago

Yep. Though I recommend also creating a network of archives.. http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

justincormack• 14 years ago

Are you sure? How many of the clay tablets made did not survive? Just because you have an old one with data does not make it effective retention.

Engraving data on diamonds is probably better...

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

If the room the clay tablet is in survives, the clay tablet survives. You can't say the same about hard drives and burned DVDs. Pressed DVDs are probably fine though.

phillmv• 14 years ago

Acid free archival paper kept in a dark, fire proof box is to my knowledge the single best technology we've invented and easily at our disposal for long-term storage.

I think I might totally start 'printing out' photos I want to theoretically have available in fifty years and place them in a safety deposit box…

pm246012• 14 years ago

Very true. Acid-free paper has a expected life of over 1000 years. Think about how long paper documents like the Magna Carta, ancient illuminated bibles from the 700's, Shakespeare's plays have survived without special climate-controlled environments.

Also paper in bulk is hard to destroy. A stack of paper is pretty dense and can survive to some degree a house fire or flood.

nooneelse• 14 years ago

How stable would the various colors of ink needed for pictures be? I suppose you could also print out a separate B/W version of each color channel for later reconstruction.

sdoering• 14 years ago

Next to paper or parchment (mentioned below), there is a technique, that uses microform. Here in Germany a lot of long-term archival work is done with this material. The information is scanned and "printed" on microfiches. In one image, there can be stored a lot (i think up to 16) pages and a lot of images are on one roll of film. Then these rolls are transferred into special containers and put in an old mine in the German "Black Forest".

There are to date more than 28.000 kilometers of microfilm with round about 850.000.000 images. They estimate, that even in 500 years there will be no information loss on these images.

German Link: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen

pjscott• 14 years ago

I'm sure we can do better; we just haven't tested the newer alternatives over a long enough time span to be sure. Take a look, for example, at the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta disk:

http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/

They made a disk of sturdy, corrosion-resistant metal, micro-etched thousands of pages of text on one side, and covered the other side with a design of words spiraling into the center and getting smaller, until they were no longer visible with the naked eye -- meant to suggest at a glance what the disk was, and how to read it. The text is a record of thousands of existing languages, like a modern, souped-up version of the original Rosetta stone.

Clay tablets have nothing on that.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

As with any archival storage system, the CAP theorem applies. Clay, Acid-free, Papyrus: pick two.

jerf• 14 years ago

Oh goodness gracious no, if you're going to measure in linear bit-years it isn't even remotely close. It's hard drives, because the amount of bits stored on hard drives is just so staggeringly enormous it dwarfs the faint traces of fragments of bits and pieces of the ancient world that we've managed to barely save. Orders and orders of magnitude off, even if you decide to count things like raw scans of the ancient stuff as opposed to merely the bits of information in the text and the other handful of useful details like the carbon dating.

You need to do some sort of correction that nonlinearly accounts for lasting more than a few years.

biot• 14 years ago

Exactly. A 2TB hard drive that is filled and only lasts one hour has a comparable bits/year ratio as 32KB that lasts 7000 years.

aneth4• 14 years ago

The coins produce by Long Now would probably beat this by a long shot.

geon2• 14 years ago

The longevity of clay tablets would be biased by the limited technology of the time. Even engraved granite would be a better choice today, since we can easily machine it now.

scraplab2• 14 years ago

I used to run backups onto VHS tapes using a PCI/ISA card adaptor. IIRC, you could get about 2GB on a tape, with a SVHS recorder, or 1GB on a normal drive. Something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

Of course, it was absolutely useless. Might as well have piped the data to /dev/null.

BCM43• 14 years ago

Was it not possible to read the data off of it?

scraplab2• 14 years ago

It was, but I wouldn't have trusted it with anything important.

Ingaz• 14 years ago

Very funny. And not so impractical - send a letter with one side as description and other as full data.

For backups I can imagine such situation: "OMG! My HDD crashed!!! Ha! No panic! I made backups! Now I just need to restore them from this bunch of scheets. And my restore program is on this sheet. Now .. Erm.. Hm.."

goggles99• 14 years ago

"Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke"

This page is 5 years old. Glad to see that it finally made it onto HackerNews.

densh• 14 years ago

> Redundancy helps to recover partially damaged data. Redundancy 1:5 means that for every 5 consecutive data blocks, if one block is completely unreadable, PaperBack will be able to restore it. To reduce damages caused by coffee pots and other common dangers, blocks are distributed around the page. Higher redundancy decreases page capacity but improves reliability.

Please do study error correcting codes. Most of them can offer much better error correction with less overhead. Take a look at Wolfram's MathWorld article [1]. This topic is heavily covered in most information theory books.

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Error-CorrectingCode.html

maxerickson• 14 years ago

The page claims to implement Reed-Solomon error correction:

http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/#8

LVB• 14 years ago

The application allows you to select between 1:2 and 1:10 redundancy.

Back up your precious files on ordinary paper

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