not important • May 9, 2025 6:37 PM

Visit the Arctic vault holding back-ups of great works
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vnyn17p57o

=At the back of the chamber, another large metal box contains GitHub’s Code Vault.

The software developer has archived hundreds of reels of open source code here, which are the building blocks underpinning computer operating systems, software, websites and apps.

Programming languages, AI tools, and every active public repository on its platform, written by its 150 million users, are also stored here.

“It’s incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software, it’s become so critical to our day to day lives,” Githhub’s chief operating officer, Kyle Daigle tells the BBC.

His firm has explored a variety of long-term storage solutions, he said, and there are challenges. “Some of our existing mechanisms can be stored for a very long time, but you need technology to read them.”

At Piql’s headquarters in southern Norway, data files are encoded onto photosensitive film.

“Data is a sequence of bits and bytes,” explains senior product developer, Alexey Mantsev, as film ran through a spool at his fingertips.

“We convert the sequence of the bits which come from our clients data into images. Every image [or frame] is about eight million pixels.”

Once these images are exposed and developed, the processed film appears grey, but viewed more closely, it’s similar to a mass of tiny QR codes.

The information can’t be deleted or changed, and is easily retrievable explains Mr Mantsev.

“We can scan it back, and decode the data just the same way as reading data from a hard drive, but we will be reading data from the film.”

One key question arising with long-term storage methods, is whether people will understand what has been preserved and how to recover it, centuries into the future.

… a team of scientists from the University of Southhampton have created a so-called 5D memory crystal, which has saved a record of the human genome.=