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This USB flash drive can only store 8KB of data, but will last you 200 years
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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How do I read that data back
With your eyes
But 100 years we’ll all be mole people without eyes!
My brain doesn't have the decryption key. I'm no man in the middle.
Just get two men to stand on either side.
It's the same problem with a drive like this, or any long term archive, you either store the data unencrypted and rely on physical security, or make sure you store the encryption key and algorithm for the same length of time, in which case you still need the physical security to protect that instead. In both cases you need to make sure you preserve a means to read the data back and details of the format its in so you can actually use it later.
Paper is actually a pretty good way of storing a moderate amount of data long term. Stored correctly it's unlikely to physically degrade, the data is unlikely to suffer bitrot and it can be read back by anything that can make an image in the visible spectrum. That means you can read it, or take a photo and use OCR to convert it into whatever format is current when the data is needed.
just print something like a QR code in absurd resolution and read it in a document scanner, a single sheet of A4 should be able to fit quite a lot of data.
I was curious, so I looked it up and it seems that around 3KB is the max for a single 177x177 code (though I imagine this is a "soft" limit?). With 600DPI being common for laser printers, a DPI-limited 3KB would be well under 1cm x 1cm. My hunch is that this wouldn't be super reliable (DPI limit not necessarily the resolution of the printer?), but I'd be curious to see what the usable QR density actually is. But yeah...a few QR codes should do the trick!
also QR codes have EXTREME data redundancy, you can cover like half of a QR code and it'll still work.
In our scenario we don't need much redundancy, since the paper will be in controlled conditions and shouldn't degrade, and we'll make damn sure to scan the entire thing without crap obscuring it.
We also don't need all the tracking features, all we need is a marking in one corner so we know what way to put it into the scanner.
All this taken together should result in a data density that is actually realistically useful with just one side of a single A4 sheet.
Imagine storing a digital photo on a piece of paper, and needing to scan it to reproduce the photo.. someone needs to do this!
Most of that could be like 10 lines of python...
PaperBack exists. It's branded as a joke, but it is functional!