CA Fire damages HP historical Documents

[jebem]

I believe the most advanced civilizations are the ones to lose all their information in first place when a disaster occurs. The more advanced technologies used, the worst, because less evidence is left after a disaster (think Spet-11).

On the other hand, a ancient civilization that wrote its knowledge on stone thousands of years ago can still be accessed and can resist to time and most catastrophic events.

A few years back a customer of mine had a datacenter disaster (a fire) and lost everything.
Literally all the storage systems were lost and the valuable backups lost as well because it were stored in the same computer room.

We know too well that most companies do not have proved/effective disaster recovery plans for all their information. Only the really critical data is secured and this only happens for enterprise companies.


I like the convenience of having my photo albums on paper (or slides that requires a basic machine to be displayed).

A fire/flood will destroy paper, yes, but also it will destroy any technological device used to store our information.
It is basically the same problem, no matter what kind of physical media support we use.

I believe one solution would be a distributed/replicated file system over servers located around the world, where we can safely store our digitized valuable assets. This technology is available from cloud suppliers for end users, some even offer storage for free, but again:
- Can we trust them to have 100% availability?
- Can we trust them in the long term?
- Can this technology resist all kind of malicious attacks?