The Arctic vault built to preserve humanity’s data
The Arctic vault built to preserve humanity’s data
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago high above the Arctic Circle — isolated and far away. It’s home to a vault that aims to be the ultimate backup for our data.
There, based in a former coal mine that closed down three decades ago, is the Arctic World Archive. Rune Bjerkestrand is its founder.
“It’s a remote destination, far away from wars, crisis, terrorism, disasters, and it’s regulated by an international treaty. It’s a demilitarized zone,” he said. “So what could be safer?”
Using head lamps, visitors descend a dark passageway, 300 meters deep into the permafrost, where temperatures are subzero. There, behind heavy doors, is the vault. Inside are stacks of silver packets containing reels of film.
“Now, we have more than 100 deposits from 30-plus countries across the world,” Bjerkestrand explained. “So it’s a wide selection of cultural heritage, history, literature, art, music — you name it.”
Inside one large box is a copy of the world’s open source code, the building blocks of most of the software and websites that we use. Kyle Daigle is chief operating officer of GitHub, which is behind this code vault.
“It’s incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software,” he said. “It’s become so critical to our day-to-day lives. We’re essentially building another wonder of the world every day by working together to write software.”
The Arctic World Archive is a commercial operation run by data preservation company Piql. At its Norwegian offices in Drammen — an hour from Oslo — all those files are printed onto film.
“We convert the sequence of the bits which come from our clients’ data into images,” said Alexey Matantsev, a senior product developer at Piql. “We are sending those raw images onto film. After that, we develop the film. We can scan it back, and we can decode the data just the same way a user could see reading data from a hard drive.”
No one knows how long this archive will last, but plans are being made to preserve the digital memories we have today — considering the uncertainty of the future.
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