'Arctic World Archive' Will Keep the World's Data Safe In an Arctic Mineshaft

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Norway's famous doomsday seed vault is getting a new neighbor. It's called the Arctic World Archive, and it aims to do for data what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has done for crop samples -- provide a remote, impregnable home in the Arctic permafrost, safe from threats like natural disaster and global conflicts. But while the Global Seed Vault is (partially) funded by charities who want to preserve global crop diversity, the World Archive is a for-profit business, created by Norwegian tech company Piql and Norway's state mining company SNSK. The Archive was opened on March 27th this year, with the first customers -- the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Norway -- depositing copies of various historical documents in the vault. Data is stored in the World Archive on optical film specially developed for the task by Piql. (And, yes, the company name is a pun on the word pickle, as in preserving-in-vinegar.) The company started life in 2002 making video formats that bridged analog film and digital media, but as the world went fully digital it adapted its technology for the task of long-term storage. As Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand tells The Verge: "Film is an optical medium, so what we do is, we take files of any kind of data -- documents, PDFs, JPGs, TIFFs -- and we convert that into big, high-density QR codes. Our QR codes are massive, and very high resolution; we use greyscale to get more data into every code. And in this way we convert a visual storage medium, film, into a digital one." Once data is imprinted on film, the reels are stored in a converted mineshaft in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The mineshaft (different to the one used by the Global Seed Vault) was originally operated by SNSK for the mining of coal, but was abandoned in 1995. The vault is 300 meters below the ground and impervious to both nuclear attacks and EMPs. Piql claims its proprietary film format will store data safely for at least 500 years, and maybe as long as 1,000 years, with the assistance of the mine's climate.

Re:

[lobiusmoop]

Worse still, it's a "proprietary format" which (as Sony has proven) tend not to have a very long life span.

Re:

[Joce640k]

It's almost as if you don't actually know what the word "proprietary" means.

Re:

[phantomfive]

As long as clear instructions are provided for reading them, it should be ok. It's not clear those requirements have been met, but still better than a poke in the eye.

Re:

[Joce640k]

I won't matter. Nobody's going to have the technology to sail to Svalbard and drill through hundreds of feet of permafrost after the zombie apocalypse.

Re:

[Joce640k]

I also wonder if they've stored instructions on how to read the QR codes down there.

D'ya think?

I trust the Norwegians to pickle our date. They've been pickling herrings for centuries with great success.

Repost from two days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://m.slashdot.org/story/324477

What the hell is wrong with you? Cant you read your own site?

Re:

[PPH]

This is just the redundant copy.

Re:

[Applehu Akbar]

If al of the world's ice were to melt, we would get 70m of additional ocean depth.

Microfiche.

[MrCodswallop]

I missed those quaint microfiche readers.

Re:

[Applehu Akbar]

Actually, Joe Biden only boned interns who could spell scour. And who came by train.

Quartz Crystal Storage

[simpz]

I always bang on about this. But Southampton University's Quartz Crystal storage claims "360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years".

This would seem best to developed for this type of application.

Re:Quartz Crystal Storage

[h33t l4x0r]

So in a million years a morlock finds a crystal, wears it as a necklace, and never guesses there's data on it. Because he's a morlock.

Re:

[Joce640k]

No, but at least he'd ignore it until evolution creates something intelligent enough to read them.

Shiny baubles though...?

Did you say.. Murlocs?!

[SCVonSteroids]

mmmrrrggglll!!......

Re:

[kinohead]

Ah, a Luddite!

Re: List of things to store on optical media

[backslashdot]

That's patent archive not parent archive. Though the latter would be funny.

Or..

[backslashdot]

A descendent of the Boston Dynamics robot will find it. Probably will feel sorry for us until it sees the video of their ancestor robot getting pushed.

Re:

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Depends on if they created some long lasting items [memory-of-mankind.com] that tell them where to look for said vault that were widely distributed to people all over.

Don't forget the neutrino beacon

[gatkinso]

After all, how will the aliens find it?

The real question is

[tylersoze]

What percentage will be porn?

lol permafrost

[drinkypoo]

Guess what happens when climate changes? Permafrost is not so permanent [bbc.com]. We don't know yet whether our unprecedented-for-literally-ages CO2 release is going to perturb the ice age cycle.

Find the least steep and most stable mountain you can, drill a big hole in it, and put it there. And then do that ten more times.

history repeats

[bonedonut]

so in 10,000 years, will the beings who find these vaults(if they aren't buried at the bottom of the sea, or under a thick layer of ice) be able to understand what they were for?

Re:

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I would think with at least one of them [memory-of-mankind.com] they would because they took steps to include some methods to help with future translation. I am not affiliated with the project other than as someone who has contributed and finds that project interesting. Also unlike this one at the seed vault the MoM project is using fired clay tablets instead of film so what they store will be stable for much longer and they took the approach that things should be readable with nothing more than an magnifying glass. Provide things

Small problem with drilling

[burtosis]

They hit some kind of large stupid metal ring with symbols around it. Melting it down did help pay for the drilling operation though.

Yea. But if it's doomsday..

[Neuronwelder]

Will there be any survivors? If there are, will they regret the fact that they did survive?? ..Getting back to storage. Since the polar ice caps are melting due to fossil fuels, wouldn't it make sense to store it in more than one place? ...If you were not among the ones that did survive, would you give a poop that they did??

Easy target

[RogueWarrior65]

Do these people realize that they have made themselves a target for everybody (major power and terrorist) with a nuke?

Once I read...

[karolgajewski]

Once I read "... its proprietary film format.." I stopped reading.

Evereything old is new again

[kevmeister]

The idea of using photographic film for archival storage of digital data is not really new. In the late 1960s, IBM developed the IBM 1360 "Photostore" system [wikipedia.org] to archive vast amounts of data. The 1360 was developed for the two Lawrence Radiation Laboratory campuses (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). The system wrote the data to silver halide film which was automatically processed and could be retrieved (after a few minutes to develop the film) in just a mi

QR Codes

[DarthVain]

While I am kind of curious how digital files of any complexity can be converted into a QR Code, even a really big one, I am also kinda curious if anyone will know WTF a QR Code is in 10 or 20 years.

I guess it must be some sort of Microfiche hybrid. In looking at options for large scale digital document storage and archives it became clear that old microfiche has held up pretty well over the test of time and is still the defacto standard in many cases.

I say we go with Mentats and Microfiches...

Miss Read

[n329619]

'Arctic World Archive' Will Keep the World's Data Safe In an Arctic Minecraft

My brain became blocky for a sec.