Inside the Arctic vault where data lasts ‘forever’
Thousands of years from now, future civilisations visiting the Arctic island of Svalbard will stumble upon a treasure trove of data from our age: software from tech companies, documents from the Vatican Museum, the recipe for McDonalds’ burgers.
At least, that’s what the Arctic World Archive is counting on. The project, founded by data storage company Piql, says it has found a way to keep digital data safe for thousands of years, safe from everything from solar flares, to flooding, to nuclear bombs. The company says more than 60 institutions from 20 countries have deposited data in its vault, which was built inside the same coal mine as the famous Global Seed Vault.
The mission: to preserve human culture for future generations. And archivists like the Digital Preservation Coalition say they have a point: digital data is more fragile than many people realise. The lifespan of a typical storage solution - a hard drive, for example, is three-to-five years. Many early websites have decayed and disappeared, and cultural institutions with vast digital collections have been the target of cyber attacks.
So how long can data really last for? And what kind of data really needs to last forever?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel | Watch more videos like this
