Longaccess Wants To Cold-Store Your Digital Life For 30 Years

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/longaccess-wants-to-cold-store-your-digital-life-for-30-years/

by comzeradd • 12 years ago

16 21 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

zaroth• 12 years ago

100GB for 30 years - €399 (~$550) on Longaccess vs $360 (plus retrieval cost) on Glacier.

Who would you trust?

witty_username• 12 years ago

From the FAQ: "We are using a combination of Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Glacier to store your files."

vrypan6• 12 years ago

Longaccess uses AWS Glacier too (a combination of S3 and Glacier, actually). The added value comes from a couple of features, like:

- making the use of Glacier friendlier to the average user

- providing a well defined way of accessing the data (retrieval, decryption, etc.). This is very useful if, for example, you want the files to be retrieved by your children in a couple of decades

- making a commitment to take care of the data for decades: if Amazon decides in 10 years that they are no longer interested in being in this business, we will move the data to an alternative provider, but nothing will change for our users.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Longaccess.

goldenkey2• 12 years ago

So you pass your liabilities onto Amazon? Utterly ridiculous that I should have to have faith in Glacier when your storage is your main product.

fragkakis• 12 years ago

Great idea.

ghshephard4• 12 years ago

I think it's great to have online long term storage, but, I'm a strong believer in also having an offline storage, particularly one that you physically control.

You can get a 3 Pack of 25 GB archival Blue-Ray discs for $15. So, for $30 you have 150 GB of truly "cold/offline" data that should last significantly longer than 30 years. Toss that in a box somewhere to go hand-in-hand with the LongAccess/AmazonGlacier storage...

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

Would they really last for 30 years? My experience with CD-Rs wasn't that good - after 15 years about 1/3 of the discs is partially unreadable.

Guess, my experience would be better if I had bought pricier better-quality discs and stored them in climate-controlled environment instead of just stuffing a bundle on a shelf.

In my experience, cold storage is best with hard drives. Preferably, in RAID-1 setup, so if one in a pair accidentally dies, the other's likely to remain intact.

ghshephard4• 12 years ago

I'm not talking about your average CD-Rs, but ECMA-379 [1] certified media. Something like the M-Disc [2]

The US Department of Defense put a lot of effort testing their DVD Media [3], and it stood up well. We'll see if their Blu-Rays likewise get the same kind of certification/accelerated life-time testing, but, at the very least, I'm guessing they will last 30 years. Just don't leave them out in the Sun.

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[2] http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

[3] http://www.mdisc.com/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod...

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

100GB for 30 years? Well, I'm not sure about average cases, but personally I have collected a stack of about a dozen of hard drives (volume ranging from 60GB to 2TB) over last 15 years. All fully loaded with the digital junk - because why delete things when you can just leave them?

Most of the data in that digital fossils is movies from that bay with pirates, but I guess there's still much more than 100GB of self-produced information - message (email, IM, phone) archives, digitized drawings, RAW photos, source code, savegames and so on.

Obviously, one could sort out the trash and compact the rest (like extracting a 10KB patch from several-gigabyte OpenWRT source tree, or radically compacting photo collection by deleting bad shots) and fit into 3GB/yr quota, but that's a hard and - unless one really wishes to fit some storage quota instead of just buying another hard drive - mostly pointless work.

mcb3k• 12 years ago

This service isn't really meant for storing things like your music and video collection, or even your day-to-day chats. I think the analogy of a safe-deposit box at the bank really describes it well. You wouldn't keep your DVD or CD collection at the bank, because storing it would be expensive and your collections are most likely easily replaced. But you might want to keep your wedding pictures, the video of your kid's first step, birth and death certificates, love letters, and important legal documents in a safe deposit box at the bank. You might even store something like your great-grandmother's wedding ring and other historic documents. Essentially all the stuff that would be difficult to replace, and would be worth keeping for the sake of posterity.

Given this, I think 100 GB is probably an acceptable amount of storage for this day and age. That may change in 5 or 10 years time as technologies change and the size of images and videos expand. But in 5 to 10 years time, services like this will probably have changed to keep up with the times.

vrypan6• 12 years ago

I couldn't have put it better, thank you!

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

The main concern I have with services like these is: will they, their hosting, and thus my data, still be available in 30 years? I can just imagine that within 5 years, the service will go "Okay we're bankrupt, sorry, you've got one week to get your data before we pull the plug".

I'd rather see a service where you can upload your data, and it'll send you back a physical data container where your data is written on a medium that is guaranteed to last the ages - i.e. no magnetic or optical (think dvd / blu-ray) storage, but more of a stable solid-state or holographic storage. In a box that can be put in a safe for posterity to discover after 30 years.

ghshephard4• 12 years ago

Archival Blu-Ray storage can last a great deal longer than 30 years - http://www.mdisc.com/ - and it's (relatively) cheap.

ljosa• 12 years ago

This would be more comforting if the data bailment were accompanies by some kind of insurament policy. Then, the stored data would be a valuable asset that could be sold to a new caretaker when Longaccess goes belly up.

vrypan6• 12 years ago

We are working on something that's somehow close to your suggestion.

Longaccess Wants To Cold-Store Your Digital Life For 30 Years

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