RE “I like big butts and I cannot lie!”
That’s what is in each of the bar codes!
Is it just me or do those things look like Conway’s Game of Life?
You idiots, don’t waste trees. How often have you actually needed to retrieve anything that you have backed up? If you just can’t live without your digital pleasures, you should probably re-evaluate your life.
Since I’m too lazy to go check if nobody else is suggesting it, may I just add: if you’re going that far, why not back up to microfiche? With the pixel-codes? I’ve seen the whole King James bible (in text!) stored on a piece of microfiche the size of a largish postage stamp.
Who guarantees that these applications will be ported to all future systems and platforms ?
This is an interesting technology for the > 20 year storage market.
For data such as emacs, which is widely distributed and hence will probably never “die”, archival isn’t very useful - people will be using it until something revolutionary comes along.
For data such as(example), the original video feed from the Moon landers; that should be put in a very platform-independent, long-lasting, readable-to-all-for-centuries format. Quality paper is a great option for the several-hundred year range.
I tried PaperBack, and was somewhat disappointed. First, forget your inkjet. Laser printer is a must. Second, ability to recover data from damaged paper is rather low…
If you want something digital but even more enduring than ASCII, check out “Arecibo Ascii” (USCII). I made an online converter to demonstrate the idea:
http://hostilefork.com/demos/uscii-5x7-english-c0/encode.html
“While ASCII uses small arbitrary values (e.g. 65 for ‘A’, 66 for ‘B’), USCII encodings use much larger values (e.g. 15621226033 for ‘A’, 16400753439 for ‘B’). These unusual numbers were chosen because they mathematically contain bitmaps of the symbols they represent! Using a technique modeled after SETI’s Arecibo Message, semiprimes are employed to suggest the two-dimensional decoding of these bit patterns.”
But perhaps I should find better things to do with my free time. 
Real man don’t do backups. Real Man use the internet.
I just wanted to add two more points:
- Thank you for returning to a topic that more technical and less esoteric. I’ve been agitating for this for a number of posts. This is a great discussion point and you’ve added info many will find useful.
- If it wasn’t for paper backup, I would have been in the poop recently.
I was working on an important report and I had just plugged in the printer to print the final version when my computer released its smoke. For those who don’t know, computers aren’t based on electricity, they are based on smoke and when it escapes they no longer work. Whatever happened blew every device connected via USB, including the backup USB device still in the USB port. I had my laptop on me, but the Mac Book Air didn’t have a DVD/CD drive and with my USB backup toast I thought I was doomed.
Luckily I had printed a draft. I was able to scan in the report and via OCR recover the entire last draft I had done. I re-did the corrections and just met the submission time. It didn’t even require re-formatting, it picked up everything.
Without paper back I would have been STUFFED!!!
The character counts that you quoted for Data Matrix, QR Code, and Aztec Code seemed surprisingly large until I realized that you quoted the maximum number of characters that can be stored in those formats. The images that you show are much smaller than those needed to store the maximum number of characters. The formats are in fact approximately 1 bit per little square, as one would expect.
Instead of using merely black and white dots, why not use several colors? I’m thinking RGB + B/W. So instead of storing the info in a binary form, you can have a 5-bit system. The 5-bit integer string of 0s, 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s that comes out as a result of reading the paper can then be converted to a more conventional binary string of 0s and 1s. Wouldn’t we be able to store loads more and make paper backups actually viable?
It’s getting kind of late here, but if anyone’s interested (and I might be), I’ll do the rough guesstimating math tomorrow.
In response to myself, I just read the Rainbow Storage link. Yep, turns out my idea was already taken. Darn.
nice article thanks for sharing, wish you continued success
This should be a joke, it does not make any sense if you can’t restore PaperBack software after 100 years. If I have a chance to store PaperBack software, I would certainly prefer to store my important files, not the PaperBack software.
Am I the only one who sees here a possibility to steal sensitive data this way and smuggle it pass security checks?
A tiny bit late to the party. Dan covered this months ago: http://www.dansdata.com/gz094.htm
Given that laser printer emissions are toxic, it’s a good idea to take a pass on this technique.
…And photocopiers for that matter. Similar technology.
And we wonder why people refer to us as geeks… As the Rosetta stone has been around for a very long time, perhaps we should backup our data onto stone tablets. I mean, that’s the point of a backup: longevity… I’m not sure what bothers me more: that someone wrote a program to do this, or that someone actually uses said program.