Why I want to store data on paper

[joel]

In my continuing quest to find long term storage solutions, one medium keeps coming up: paper.

Why? With any new technology we can only make statistical guesses at the lifespan of that technology.

With paper, we have over 500 years of experience printing and storing it. Considering all that experience, and that there are 48 remaining copies of

Comments

Thanks

[joel]

for shattering my dreams.

Re: Thanks

[joel]

[krellan]

Interesting idea. I was cleaning out some old boxes and discovered some old printouts of webpages that I made around 1996 or so. They've outlasted a lot of other data I had, because they were on paper, and they're no longer online (not even on archive.org

YES

[joel]

I spent some time recently looking at 2D barcodes. PDF417 seemed like the 2D barcode most appropriate for my needs.

I really really like your idea of storing data in both human and machine readable formats. Awesome!

Also, thanks for the link to the NPR story, it was very inspiring.

Re: YES

[krellan]

Thanks, glad I remembered the story so I could show you.

While we're on the subject of 2D barcodes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7TSDUHhPIw

As for expanding the barcode to fill a useful surface such as the back of a photo, I wish I could remember the name of the product that was advertised during the 1980's, then I'd know what to search for.

I do remember that its "scanner" was just an alternate printer ribbon that fit a common model of printer at the time, so that the software could simply print rows of empty spaces to the printer, and thus reuse the printer's paper feeding and printhead moving mechanism to move the "scanner" along the page! Very clever hack, although it obviously limited its market to those who had purchased that particular model of printer (good luck using that product to restore data in the future when that printer is no longer available)!

Oh

[joel]

I love your story about printed web pages, it's yet another story I can tell in support of this idea.

Thanks for the tip on the software you saw advertised in the 1980's I'll have to follow up on that and see what I can find!

another open soucre program I found:

[anonymous]

Here is yet another option:
http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
It's only command-line, and lack an gui, but maybe it's a good start to get the thing going?

Re: another open soucre program I found:

[joel]

Wow! I'm surprised that I missed this ... I've spent a bit of time looking at the RONJA project.

Thanks!