Wow, this was boring
I have this idea of an application: it will control a huge printer that will spray the mineral paint over the wall of a cave, forming a human-readable backup of your data.
Version 1.0 will aim to store up to 500 MB per cave and your data will be safe for at least 32,000 years, or your money happily refunded!
This post made me think of this:
Storing hundreds of gigabytes of data on a sheet of paper - http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=88962&d=18&m=11&y=2006
It sounds to good to be true, and it is - http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2006/11/8288.ars
My company uses xml to archive stuff, we assume it will still be readable 50 years from now. When you store stuff in an rdbms like MS SQL or MySQL you are far less save.
As said before, April 1st was months ago.
Hmm… so how about combining the PaperBack encoding with a MakerBot-like device and create OpenRosettaStone? PlasticBack FTW!
There’s a coding error on the IBM JCL punched card: should be no
space between
SLINK,
and
TESTPGM=
Erica on July 31, 2009 2:55 PM
Not necessarily an error, that could just be a comment.
I’ve noticed a few complaints about acid in paper… very recently I went to look about “archival” paper and found that really almost any laser paper that was sold at my local Staples or whatever was acid-free at this point. As far as I can tell the obsession with acid in your printing paper is rather out of date.
Can you provide the stackoverflow datadump in this format? 
Made me think of Futurama (S02E03) oddly:
PaperBack reminds me of a pair of programs I had on my Amiga back in the day of 300 baud modems and dot matrix printers.
You would run the program (I forget the name) and open the file you wanted to send to your buddy. It would encode the file to something like data matrix, then print it all out on the printer.
You would take all the sheets and mail them to your friend who would run the second program that would scan everything back in and decode it to the original file.
I’m pretty sure that’s the original way PGP made it over to Europe back when you couldn’t export it by disk or modem. A nice little loophole in the law. 
If you want to archive to a medium that will never detiorate, TwinkyBack is the only way to go.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve heard in a long time…
Sweet.
I made a change to one word. Please back it up again.
Cordially,
Your paper supplier
Man this is a nice little program, here I’ve gone and made a Wikipedia page for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperback_%28software%29
Is there a world-wide standard specification for this paper-based compression/encryption system? Like Microsoft’s ‘open’ xml?
What about i18n?
First you need to decide what it is that needs long-term archiving. No one sensible will whiz off 1e6 sheets to save /tmp on a daily basis.
Really important things that people might care about 50, 100, 250 years from now, well, we often call those ‘books’ and publish them en masse redundantly distributed in an unencoded format.
Its of course impossible to know what will be important “in the future” but hey that’s not a new problem and outside the scope of storage medium (the “save it all” arg is silly if you look at all the cache and buffer crap).
We forget that “data” isn’t the problem, but “information” is. For truly long term storage you need to use an editorial mindset to try to choose wisely what might be readable long term. Eg. NASA space probes, rather than assuming 800bpi tape would last forever, summations of data sets would have been nice to have, now, even though at the time they could know it’s just a subset.
One Indian student seems to have used such idea to compress huge amount of data few years back. Searching in google provide me with the following results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Storage
Very interesting to read:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Indian_student_develops_paper_based_storage_system
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/rvd_system/
@Chris S:
DVDs and even older CDs have to be kept in dark(er) place and preferably inside plastic case (or on a spindle). Just recently, I found a batch of bakup CDs from 1998-1999 and they were in perfect working order. I had some no-names ones, and couple of Verbatim/BASF.
I also had a look at some CDs/DVDs that have been on the CD shelf and they do show some yellowing, although they still work.
Media is very sensitive to (extended exposure to) UV radiation and should be handled/kept accordingly.
captcha: In tops
How does paperback deal with aged paper? Faded ink? Torn or curled pages?
We need some kind of permanent, cheap, long term storage, like some kind of sci-fi crystal storage device. That, or DVDs that are readable after 10 years.