"Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years"
I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.
The Royal Mint has existed for 1,100 years. That's pretty much the most stable government-owned business-like entity I can find.
The Stora Kopparberg mining company has existed since it was granted a charter from King Magnus IV in 1347.
A few banks tend to last for a long time [1]. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena has existed for about 540 years.
Beretta, the italian firearms company, has existed for 486 years (and has been family owned the entire time).
East and West Jersey were owned by a land proprietorship for around 340 years starting from King Charles II bestowing the land to his brother James in 1664. [2]
At first I thought multinational corporations would be more stable because they could move from land to land to avoid wars and such. But apparently they haven't lasted nearly as long as their single-nation counterparts.
The Knights Templar were granted a multi-national tax exemption by Pope Innocent II in 1139, and lasted almost 200 years until most of their leadership was killed off in 1307.
The Dutch East India Trading Company was one of the first [modern] multinational corporations, spanning almost 200 years from 1602-1798.
However, the longest-lasting companies have been family owned and operated. [3] [4]
It appears most all companies that have lasted a long time are due to two factors: dealing in basic goods and services that all humans need, and looking ahead to the future to change with the times.
> Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this
I don't consider that obvious. I live in Berlin, the capital of what most would consider a stable country, but my apartment (which is even older) has been a part of 5 different countries in the last 100 years (German Empire, Weinmar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany and finally, the Federal Republic of Germany).
Sorry, what I meant by "stable" there is countries that have been relatively stable for a few hundred years and seem reasonably likely to continue that integrity for at least a century or so.
Of course, predicting future stability is complete guesswork!
Even the US had a close call with a fairly nasty civil war in that time frame, and in three days the 198th anniversary of the Burning of Washington happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington "On August 24, 1814, after defeating the Americans at the Battle of Bladensburg, a British force led by Major General Robert Ross occupied Washington, D.C. and set fire to many public buildings. The facilities of the U.S. government, including the White House and U.S. Capitol, were largely destroyed."
The Thai king is the longest-reigning current head of state, ascending the throne on 9 June 1946. Elizabeth II of England is 2nd, 6 February 1952.
The oldest country (not government) is likely Vietnam (2897 BCE). Other contenders: Japan (660 BCE), China (221 BCE), Ethiopia (~800 BCE), or Iran (678 BCE).
Few of today's modern states pre-date the 19th Century, many antedate World War II or the great de-colonialisation of the 1960s including much of Africa and Oceana (some of the longest inhabited regions of Earth).
Among the more long-lived institutions are the Catholic Church (traditionally founded by Jesus ~30 AD, emerging as an institutional power in 2nd Century Rome). The oldest company I can find is Kongo Gumi, founded in 578, a Japanese construction firm. The record however is likely held by the Shishi Middle School founded in China between 143 and 141 BCE.
My own suggestion would be the Krell, though some might disqualify this based on a requirement for human organization.
That was my thought as well. However it spent a great deal of time under foreign rule: under the Greeks and Romans, the Turkish / Ottoman empire, and later under British occupation. And, I just discovered what boxer Muhammad Ali's referent was.
We are straying a bit off topic here. I don't think any country has been stable for a "few" hundred years. A few is 3. This is before the US was founded.
I would say a stable country is one which has had a legit democracy for 70 or so years and doesn't share a border with a non-democratic / non-legit-democratic state. These two points suggests its unlikely to have a revolution or be invaded any time soon.
Of course, if you look at the UK governments track record with IT.. you wouldn't trust it. I would say the same with the US, especially in concern with data security.
I think I could argue that England has been pretty stable since at least the end of the Civil War - which is 360 years ago. A lot of the institutions that form part of the current UK go back an awful lot further than that.
I'll reject your democratic requirement out of hand, as democracies haven't proven particularly stable. There was that trial-run in Athens which lasted 501 years (508 - 7 BCE, with interruptions). Other than a few small/outlying instances (most notably the Althing in Iceland, it didn't re-emerge until the short-lived Corsican Republic (1755), and of course, the United States (1776).
Japan (660 BCE) and China (221 BCE) have both had feudal / bureaucratic governments exhibiting very high levels of stability. While dynasties and eras are marked, the overall states persisted largely intact.
No offense, but Germany is far from what I'd call a stable nation. It has, in fact, only been a nation for 141 years. and during that time has, as you've noted changed governments many times.
There are some pretty old commercial organisations out there. One list [1] has several that have existed for over 1000 years. Whether they would be capable of storing data (or would even be interested in doing so) is hard to say, but there have at least demonstrated that long-term organisational continuity is possible, and that presumably requires some organisational 'memory'.
Having a long history obviously isn't a predictor of future stability. According to the Long Now Foundation site [2], a Japanese company that existed since 578CE went bust in 2007.
But, it has not been as stable as you might think. During the 1300s, the popes resided in France.
As recently as 1870, during the Italian unification, the church was stripped of its power to govern Rome after an armed confrontation between armies at the gates of Rome ("XX Septembre"). During this period, the Pope (the ninth Pius) seriously considered fleeing Italy.
If you really want the organization to survive for a long term, you need to make it a religion.
If you can figure out a way to convince a few dozen people every decade that the best way to glorify God is to isolate themselves off somewhere maintaining your archival data, you'll be set for centuries.
Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!)
Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) have entered our economy, that's a question begging to be answered.
Amazon at least seems to be an "eventually durable" datastore, though. Meaning that if you are told in the future that it will go offline, you have an excellent chance to make other suitable arrangements. Say there's a 0.01% chance of this product being discontinued next year, up to a 10% chance 5 years from now. I have to think there will almost certainly be other services you can move your data to, on similar terms, for a long time.
That's assuming you're around at all, and nothing reeeeeally bad happens even so. Making data last after your death (or even after you stop paying!) is a lot harder in this environment, and achieving true 100-year durability is a tough nut indeed.
I like your bank idea, since the preservation of a bank account is just a specialized simple case of data preservation. Data preservation seems rather more reliable when the data is directly attached to money. Then again, maybe banks themselves are on their way out for this purpose — Dropbox could become the new safety-deposit box.
But there are 100-year domain registrations, after all. Maybe we're ready for organizations to at least offer 100-year storage, too.
And, since you mentioned Danny Hills, it's also worth mentioning that (ironically?) Jeff Bezos is one of the principle supporters of http://longnow.org/clock/.
And that makes me think of Anathem and the potential issues around long-term data storage that is capable of surviving through falls of civilisations and/or sacks of storage areas.
Probably what would be required is an array of arrays of separate storage providers and services providing "RAID" on top of these storage providers - and you won't want to trust any of these you'll want a few of them... (hence the array of arrays).
leastauthority.com (the Tahoe LAFS folks) are trying to promote the concept of "RAIC" (C=Cloud). I'm not sure what the status of the project is, though...
FWIW, we are happy to support this kind of use, and see our customers doing it in an ad-hoc way every day. We have s3cmd in our environment, and support it. As soon as their is a glacier complement to s3cmd we will put that into place as well, although with the strange traffic and retrieval pricing, I'm not sure how useful folks will find it ...
If you really wanted to preserve something, I'd consider printing it on gold leaf. One gram of gold turns into about 4 sq ft, and assuming we can print at 1200dpi, we'd have 4 x 144 x 1200 x 1200 bits, or about 100 megabytes. So you'd need about ten grams, at a price of $530 or so, plus storage. Though you could just bury it in your backyard.
> Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.
As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?).
As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?)
I'd store my pictures there. Finding old pictures of grandparents when they were little, or even older stuff, is amazing. Wouldn't it be cool if my descendants could still look at pictures of my family in 100 years?
Provided that downloading from this 100 year store is something I could do X times per year, and so long as I could append more data to it over time, it's an interesting business model.
To be fair, if improvements in hardware and software continue at the rate they have been, or some moderate percentage thereof, in 100 years it will be no problem to trawl a few exabytes of data for anything interesting.
There's a blog that's analyzing Geocities, that's about 1 terabyte of 1 KB files. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ The analysis tracks changes in template design, follows modifications to logos and gifs, and unearths collections of shrines to dead children etc.
But that's from when it was harder to make and upload data, so people only put meaningful (to them) stuff online. These days we'd have a hundred thousand copies of a few popular MP3's and everyone's crappy digital photos. The percentage of meaningful stuff would be a lot lower.
This seems like a very interesting business idea. It'd require some level of initial operating capital and a relatively competent server farm team, but I don't think it'd have to be fancy.
"Long Data, LLC... We secure your data for the long-term".
What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics.
Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.