(05-31-2019, 02:44 PM)Lady Fitzgerald Wrote: Hmmm. How well would that work for videos? Flip pages? If one has a lot of data (such as my 10TB), that would take a large truckload of paper. Searching for specific data in that pile would take forever. Getting that much paper is also hard on trees.
Backups can't be static. One has to actively maintain them to ensure corruption doesn't creep in and the media they are stored on is kept up to date so it doesn't become obsolete and, thus, irrecoverable.
It is obviously not very practical for large amounts of data.
However it could be useful to backup extremely important data.
You could also sort the paper into folders, so you know what is
on them.
Appearently, one can store up to a maximum of 23648 bits in a single
QR-Code, although the thing would be quite large (177 by 177 "modules",
as the blocks seem to be called). That is slightly below 3 kB.
I am curious, so I calculated it (most numbers are rounded):
My favourite song (Reason to Belive, from Arch Enemy) is about 32 MB large
stored as FLAC. That would need about 10827 QR-Codes. If I convert it to
OGG-Vorbis, it is only about 3.76 MB large, which would require about 1250
QR-Codes. So it is definitely not suited to store audio in a remotely high
quality.
However, the picture of the album cover, a jpg, 1000 by 100 pixel, is only
269 kB large, needing around 90 QR-Codes, which is way saner. If we put
two QR-Codes on a piece of paper, and also two on its back, you'd need
about 23 pieces of paper. Obviously printing out the picutre would only need
a single piece of paper, but scanning that back in will have negative effects
on the quality, while scanning the QR-Codes and putting the split data back
into a picture will lead to a bit to bit exact copy of the picture,
therefore being an
nice interesting option for longterm backups of
small-ish pictures with a relatively low risk of quality-loss. And since
you get the exact same file back, you could even use check-sums to see if
the data has corrupted.
Historically, paper is one of the most reliable storage media, loosing
only to things like carved stone. Having a way to put any possible
data onto paper (and theoretically even into stone) is an interesting idea
to make the jobs of future archeologists easier and more fun.