(ANTIMEDIA) Norway — Many have heard of Norway’s Global Seed Vault, where seeds from Earth’s most important plants are collected and stored 1,000 feet underground to keep them safe during a doomsday scenario.
Now, that same concept is being applied to another area — digital data.
It was reported over the weekend that a private Norwegian company, Piql, has just opened a vault in the same mountain. This one is intended to store backups of the world’s most valuable documents and texts.
Called the Arctic World Archive, the vault, which opened March 27, is available to all — governments, private organizations, and individual citizens alike. Security at the installation is, of course, high-tech. The medium through which the data is stored, however, is not.
“It’s digital data preserved, written onto photosensitive film,” Piql founder, Rune Bjerkestrand, told Live Science. “So we write data as basically big QR codes on film.”
Piql’s method of storage is essentially analog, which, as Live Science notes, is rooted in physical signals as opposed to digital ones and zeros. As such, Bjerkestrand says the stored data can’t be hacked — it’s “carved in stone.”
When asked by clients to retrieve stored documents, Piql staff must manually dig up the film reel. The data is then uploaded to the client through secure means such as a virtual private network (VPN).
Bjerkestrand claims data at Arctic World Archive — any and all types, he says — can be preserved safely for up to 1,000 years. Already, documents from the National Archives of Brazil and Mexico have been sent to the vault.
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