Like I’d imagine there’s gonna be a lot of rain over time if I want this time capsule to last like idk 10 years? 30 years?
Is there like a box so tough its indestructible?
Can animals dig it up if I bury it?
How deep do it bury it?
Is the earth’s magnetism gonna affect the hard drive? (Or is there a better medium?)
Like I want this to be like very low budget, I don’t have millions to build an actual timecapsule like some organizations have done. Is there some cheap box that’s waterproof to protect a hard drive from damage for like 30 years buried in the ground?
i think your best bet would just be to brute force it: get a bunch of different media (usb-drives, CDs, hard drives, whatever you can get your hands on and ideally from different brands) and just put the same data on all of them, then wrap in a series of plastic bags that you try to put a vacuum on, put in the most durable water and ideally airtight container you can get your hands on, then again wrap that in some plastic bags because why not.
Then bury all that as deep as you can and surround it in rocks, especially i think you’ll want a bunch of rocks on top of it. And for extra points repeat all this as many times as possible in different locations.
All this is just to compound the chances that at least one of the copies of the data will survive, and even if that fails you’ll hopefully end up with enough data being intact across the different storage mediums that you can piece the data together somehow, i’m not sure how precisely you’d do that but it’s at least possible to figure out so long as the data is there.
There definitely is an advantage to different media types. Each technology has their own limitations. Tape back up, SSD, USB drive, DVD and HD with spinning platers
SSD would be 100% dead unless you buried it with a power source.
Huh? Why? Should SSDs not be able to contain data without power?
That’s one of the downsides of SSDs, you lose data really fast without power. Like, after a year, your data will almost sure not be intact.
Flash memory stores data as a voltage level, with different values being a tiny distance apart. The voltage slowly leaks out of the cells and has to be periodically topped off.
No, they’ll start to corrupt within a year or two. They need to be powered to retain data.
After 30 years you can forget it.
Sadly, no.
There was a recent paper on this. The failure rate was higher than expected. You’ll have to search for it; I didn’t save a link.
Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.
That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.
A raid6 array across a collection of separate disks might do it.