Portable Library of Alexandria - Taking my digital hoarding habit on the go

[Distended Gunt]

This may be useful if society is just completely dysfunctional for a period of time (like South Africa levels of violence and decay) but never really collapses and becomes more normal again after a year of pain. The hardware OP has suggested won't last for any real amount of time since it is sensitive to vibration, temperature and water damage. It's also basically irreplaceable if anything goes wrong + the software stack is way too complicated and is one bad rm -rf away from being an unfixable mess.

Personally, I'd write out everything important to LTO tapes, duplicate those tapes a few times over and then print out books for the very useful stuff. (like guides or whatever) For entertainment, you're probably better off just keeping a small collection of DVDs as they're pretty durable and it probably won't be hard to find a working player.

 

[Keyweed]

Personally, I'd write out everything important to LTO tapes, duplicate those tapes a few times over and then print out books for the very useful stuff. (like guides or whatever) For entertainment, you're probably better off just keeping a small collection of DVDs as they're pretty durable and it probably won't be hard to find a working player.

To add to this, I'd look into the newer Verbatim M DISC (based on Blu-Ray BDXL). You can get 100gb per disk, they're write once only, they're inorganic and are projected to last a few hundred years in less than ideal environments. Definitely not as dense as LTO, but I think they're a pretty good archival medium.
Honestly, for the project overall, I think you'd want to diversify your storage mediums anyway. You don't really want to have any single point of failure (an irreplaceable SBC, an unreadable format, etc.). I'd want to have a swiss army knife of formats/mediums so that I could take advantage of anything I could find for accessing the info in a post-collapse scenario. So that might be rugged SBCs with HDDs, BR disks, LTOs, microfiche(?), books; any/all in a redundant (and distributed) fashion to maximize odds of survival and future readability. Some will obviously have to be updated a lot less often, but in this case, I think it's really fine to have some of the more durable formats be a little out of date.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

You're not the only one with that mindset. I have a steadily growing ebook and media library that I still use and archive. Backups are simple. New additions are rsynced to a staging volume. From staging volume another copy is made to a disk. Archive disks are swapped out for new ones whenever there are any major sector errors if they happen. Usually these NAS disks end up lasting for a good 5 years 24/7.

 

[Edman96]

This may be useful if society is just completely dysfunctional for a period of time (like South Africa levels of violence and decay) but never really collapses and becomes more normal again after a year of pain. The hardware OP has suggested won't last for any real amount of time since it is sensitive to vibration, temperature and water damage. It's also basically irreplaceable if anything goes wrong + the software stack is way too complicated and is one bad rm -rf away from being an unfixable mess.

Personally, I'd write out everything important to LTO tapes, duplicate those tapes a few times over and then print out books for the very useful stuff. (like guides or whatever) For entertainment, you're probably better off just keeping a small collection of DVDs as they're pretty durable and it probably won't be hard to find a working player.

I try to keep everything important on paper because, as history has shown, this is the most reliable way to transfer information. Disks and external drives are good now, but it is unclear how to use them without electricity (here I end, and I do not want to create any theories ).

 

[tehpope]

This project is on the back burner while I deal with some other IRL shit.

Personally, I'd write out everything important to LTO tapes, duplicate those tapes a few times over and then print out books for the very useful stuff. (like guides or whatever) For entertainment, you're probably better off just keeping a small collection of DVDs as they're pretty durable and it probably won't be hard to find a working player.

Yeah definitely. For a long term homestead, I agree. But if you're traveling around and weight is a factor, good luck traveling with stacks of tapes and a LTO drive. For reduncy, you could carry around external SSD enclosures with dupes of the data. And/Or something like this with multiple micro sd cards. 512gb are pretty good bang for your buck and its only time before 1tb come down in price.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Tape always struck me as massively impractical for the kind of "set it and forget it" backups we're talking about here. Yes, it may be a fact that the tape in an LTO cartridge will outlast our solar system or whatever, but who cares if your eternal tape can only be read by uncommon, expensive specialist hardware locked into a perpetual cycle of planned obsolescence? If you own the newest type of LTO reader right now, the oldest LTO tape it can read is from 2015. And conversely, if you have a tape from 2000, the physical tape will still be good but you're out of luck reading it unless you also hoarded a reader no newer than 2005.

LTO really only makes sense in an enterprise environment where you have ultra-massive, constantly-expanding, proprietary data sets and a full-time staff devoted to cycling it through one generation of tape technology after another.

For a real "doomsday bunker" scenario I'd want something that I could just use on any old computer I pulled out of a landfill. Optical discs, hard drives, whatever kind of card media has a decent lifespan. Make a dozen copies in case some go bad, we're not talking about extremely expensive media here.

 

[tehpope]

Fun board, and there are many kits like this. It's just such a simple CPU to wrap your head around that I'd come up with a solution for myself to really understand it. Depending on speed you don't really even need professionally-made PCBs to build computers with it. It's upside (easy to program) is also it's downside though, the Z80 is not a clever CPU and not fast in many things. Something like the 6502 (Apple II/II, C64 (kind of), many others) is more performant clock-for-clock but harder to program for. The deluxe would be the 68k which also has quite a few modern iterations and you could also do some simple graphical output more easily for without wanting to kill yourself or it feeling like pulling teeth. These architectures are harder to wrap your head around programming-wise, though. I'm sure there are cheap kits for them too.

This popped up in my feed today. There are a few premade kits online. Some do come with a lpt port you could wire up for a printer. The pico is like $10-15 a pop. So not out of the ordinary to just buy a bunch bulk and have a few premade kits on hand just in case shit happens.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

This popped up in my feed today. There are a few premade kits online. Some do come with a lpt port you could wire up for a printer. The pico is like $10-15 a pop. So not out of the ordinary to just buy a bunch bulk and have a few premade kits on hand just in case shit happens.

Picos can be had for $5 USD if you're near a microcenter.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I have been considering doing something like this as well. I too am a complete hoarder and obsessed with the archival of data and information. I am just really paranoid about losing information and current times only make my paranoia about it worse.

I have a target of buying some real large storage for all my shit. I currently own a 4tb external HD and a total of 1.5tb on the PC itself (500 ssd 1tb hdd) but I still want more, especially if I am going to store games for playing in the future as those can stack up really fast and movies and series in decent quality are hard to find in decent size since people apparently don't fucking bother compressing their shit anymore (like seriously why are all 1080p movies like 7gigs on average you could get those down to 1gig with a .mkv file for the love of god just run a conversion I can't kill my poor CPU and GPU doing that.) My dream purchase atm is one of those 18tb drives in a aluminium case like the WD G-drive or something.

For what you suggest on the OP I would think that actually your best bet on making it good and hardcore durable would be to build it from absolute scratch sorta like a cyberdeck project. Cyberdecks are basically little portable computers based on the shit described on Technomancer novel that all look hella cool even if they are sorta useless, though some people have used them are really good portable computing for doing stuff like network management and maintenance as they are far more versatile than a smartphone without being constrained like regular notebooks or netbooks. They tend to be made out of a Raspberry Pi or similar as the core and then mounted on a custom shell, often 3d-printed, where you then attach the interfaces and such. Some real neat stuff.

One of the OGs of the site I linked.

Russian poorfag cyberdeck

Superior japanese aesthetics are obligatory given the Japanese influence on Cyberpunk as a genre

For what you describe, the way you would go about it would be aiming for a meme like these:

Schematics and data [1] [2] [3]

You would want to go with a solid metal or polymer case that is at least water proof, and make sure to try and stabilize the insides so it can handle some knocking about. Put the Pi or similar on center, mount a board to attach a array of drives and fill the rest of the space with batteries to make for some real long uptime.

 

[seri0us]

This popped up in my feed today. There are a few premade kits online. Some do come with a lpt port you could wire up for a printer. The pico is like $10-15 a pop. So not out of the ordinary to just buy a bunch bulk and have a few premade kits on hand just in case shit happens.

"Yes, and now by the magic of film making I have inseminated your girlfriend! as we can see from the test results... yes... she is pregnant! Now I know what you are thinking, "but Chris you could not have possibly inseminated my girlfriend your p*nis has been in your pants the whole time!" and you’d be quite right but how is it then that my sperm is inside her at this moment? Well thanks to recent advancements in quantum tunnelling, long range insemination is now possible! Let’s take a closer look.”

 

[Kosher Dill]

For what you suggest on the OP I would think that actually your best bet on making it good and hardcore durable would be to build it from absolute scratch sorta like a cyberdeck project.

Why not just buy a Panasonic Toughbook off of Ebay instead of 3D-printing your own version of Penny's communicator from "Inspector Gadget" and adding a memechanical keyboard?

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Why not just buy a Panasonic Toughbook off of Ebay instead of 3D-printing your own version of Penny's communicator from "Inspector Gadget" and adding a memechanical keyboard?

Gonna be honest, I wasn't aware of Panasonic Toughbooks. But having taken a look I am gonna go out on a limb and say it would be somewhat hard to get it up to the full autistic potential of OPs idea of being a true time capsule. Even with the perfect expansion modules it would be hard pressed to pass 3tb of storage and the maximum battery life is 36 hours (that is what the website says, but apparently under use it is more like 24 with best option and 12 vanilla).

This autismo project meanwhile could store up to 16tb of shit easy. You would literally have endless freedom to choose whatever you want to add as a accesory, you could cram batteries up the ass for full 48 hours of use. You could add a E-Ink display to read e-books from and have the battery reach triple digits of life expectancy. The sky is the limit.

 

[AmpleApricots]

op. So not out of the ordinary to just buy a bunch bulk and have a few premade kits on hand just in case shit happens.

If I had to re-computerize civilization I´d personally probably go with something that's less Harvard and more Von Neumann but honestly, if shit hits the fan that hard in your lifetime there will not be new computers of even that performance. Many of these microcontrollers can run circles around high-end PCs of the 90s, processing-power wise. Their biggest problem is architecture and with that memory and the inability to really add more in practical ways or interface with external devices at good speeds.

That said, microcontrollers are seriously cool nowadays and really blur some lines. You can even get DOS/Win 3.1x run on some. In emulation. They'll even do VGA output via GPIO. No specialized hardware, just by sheer will of processor omph. It is insane. I've been playing lately with first forth and then lisp on some of the stronger ones and you could do a lot of novel, experimental computing stuff with them. They're not used to their fullest extent and that so many end up blinking some LEDs before ending up in a drawer forever really is a massive shame.

I also love tiny computers and computers in tiny spaces and stumbled across cyberdecks and they're all pretty meh. Some ideas are interesting but it's mostly style over function (often seen in that space - first design the case, then figure out how to fit batteries in it) and a lot of impractical design choice (7" 16:9 screens are not and never will be daily driver size) and the terminal weebism and all the other diseases (troonism etc.) that usually come with it. Didn't have patience for that stuff beyond that point.


EDIT: I own one of these:


Which is as close as of a cyberdeck that was actually commercially sold. It's sort of a clone of the more known TRS80 with a few extras, like optionally more memory and an internal clock/better BASIC. It's an 8085 that can I guess be used as a typewriter and also has BASIC (interesting note, you can toggle every single pixel on the screen individually on and off via the BASIC implmenetation) it's uhh... not really a practical computer. Back then everything power was really inefficent and so the battery doesn't last very long, with modern plumbing in the power department I could make that original CPU last forever on a few modern li-ions, I just wanted to leave it original though. Screens you read from can actually be small just fine, but screens you interact with do have to be a certain size. I learned that over the years.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Yeah if you want to make something that will stand the test of time it needs to be simple as fuck and durable as all hell. Satellites and space probes have specs that are absolutely hilariously under powered when compared to even regular computers at the time they launch because of this: It costs so fucking much to send stuff out you need to make absolutely dead sure it isn't gonna get fucked in the way, so the simpler it is the easier it is to ensure stability.

It's for that reason I recommend OP should go for a Cyberdeck type of meme, but make it a more ordinary "briefcase" design so it can be better for sustained use instead of just looking cool as fuck. I am myself considering building a deck just for the fun of it and to have something to use in case of a emergency.

 

[bush911]

Has someone tried this for the internet archive and archive today?

 

[RVRY]

Does anyone have a good way to check for bitrot for a tech illiterate?

It would be nice to check if a certain backup drive got corrupt so I don't keep copying that one!

 

[tehpope]

Has someone tried this for the internet archive and archive today?

Yeah no. At least for the IA, they have several petabytes of data. Portability is out of the question. With my idea, I was thinking of having several thousand digital books and some audio (music, podcasts, old time radio, et. al). Maybe some movies too if I had extra drives. But with 4tb, movies would take up too much space.

Does anyone have a good way to check for bitrot for a tech illiterate?

It would be nice to check if a certain backup drive got corrupt so I don't keep copying that one!

https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/check-ssd-or-hdd-health-with-smart/

Run a smart test on them periodically.

Have multiple backups. The 3-2-1 rule is still used. 3 backups, 2 different mediums, 1 off site backup.

 

[RVRY]

with-smart/ Run a smart test on them periodically.

That's for checking if the drive itself is in good condition, I'm more talking about checking folders and files themselves that they are not damaged (their original data is intact). It doesn't matter if I got good drives if I keep backing up the same old corrupted folder.

 

[Aidan]

That's for checking if the drive itself is in good condition, I'm more talking about checking folders and files themselves that they are not damaged (their original data is intact). It doesn't matter if I got good drives if I keep backing up the same old corrupted folder.

That's what checksums are for. Drives and some file systems already check for this and I don't think I've had any issues from bit rot that got lumped into existing backups. If you're this worried about the data then you'd probably want to hash the files in question and on each backup verify these important files, which is cumbersome.
Rsync can do this and with a dry run you could identify the changes without doing backups if you wanted to do a check without moving anything. Not sure of a less technical way to go about this, non-technical people don't tend to consider bit rot or data integrity.

If you're willing to try something more technical, OpenZFS sort of does what I described above but way better and at a much lower level. It's transparent to you and can automatically heal under the right circumstances but at this point set up RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 using ZFS. If you want, this conversation should probably be carried to another thread like https://kiwifarms.st/threads/no-stupid-questions-general.62906/
Some reading: https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/RAID-and-RAIDZ/

Expanding on this, I think redundancy is important for anyone working on their local copy of goods and ZFS can be set up on SBCs or really anything you can think of. Something to consider and I've had good experiences with it.

 

[RVRY]

That's what checksums are for. Drives and some file systems already check for this and I don't think I've had any issues from bit rot that got lumped into existing backups. If you're this worried about the data then you'd probably want to hash the files in question and on each backup verify these important files, which is cumbersome.
Rsync can do this and with a dry run you could identify the changes without doing backups if you wanted to do a check without moving anything. Not sure of a less technical way to go about this, non-technical people don't tend to consider bit rot or data integrity.

If you're willing to try something more technical, OpenZFS sort of does what I described above but way better and at a much lower level. It's transparent to you and can automatically heal under the right circumstances but at this point set up RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 using ZFS. If you want, this conversation should probably be carried to another thread like https://kiwifarms.st/threads/no-stupid-questions-general.62906/
Some reading: https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/RAID-and-RAIDZ/

Expanding on this, I think redundancy is important for anyone working on their local copy of goods and ZFS can be set up on SBCs or really anything you can think of. Something to consider and I've had good experiences with it.

Will check it out for the bigger and fewer files.

But... I know about checksums, and as you said, it's an hassle. To add some context how bad it is, it's about audio files (DJ music library), and I have gotten in some awkward situations where I got a corrupt file of a track I want to play (went back and checked that the OG file was corrupt). So it's a lot of small files to go through and check all the songs specific checksum, just for this to not happen again. I feel like I'm in a digital hell with this problem.

This issue of course applies to ebooks. To not derail this thread.