As I See It: From Disk, To Cloud, To Coal Mine

March 24, 2025 Victor Rozek

Back in the 1970s, my first IT job was working swing shift in computer operations. In those days disk packs were removable, and my primary task after running nightly reports was doing backups – copying the day’s updates and transactions from the live pack to the backup pack.

Nightly backups were an article of faith. They were akin to unquestioned IT doctrine. The smooth functioning of companies depended on them because they mitigated the consequences of hardware failures. Head crashes were rare but not uncommon. And when they occurred, they made a grim screeching sound that signaled data being scraped from the spinning multi-platter packs. It’s a sound you don’t easily forget.

Recovery included restoring backups from the previous night, and tasking the data entry staff with re-entering the day’s lost transactions and edits. It was an imperfect process and, invariably, some data was lost, but at the time it was the only option available.

Then came Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider.

If credit and blame are two sides of the same coin, we can, in large part, credit Dr. Licklider for the ease with which backups can now be performed, and blame him for the fact that hardly anybody does them deliberately.

Licklider was nothing if not prophetic. Back in 1962, he was already contemplating the existence of a global network. He wrote a series of memos describing what he called an “Intergalactic Computer Network”.

The name must have sounded ridiculously ambitious as, I suppose, was the notion that anyone could one day access applications and data from anywhere in the world. And, if Licklider could be taken seriously, perhaps even beyond. Undeterred, Licklider brought his ideas to the development of an early government network called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

ARPANET was developed by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and was the precursor to the Internet. It was a packet-switching network that connected computers at research institutions and universities. It laid the foundation for modern networking technologies. Move the clock ahead a few decades, and his visionary contributions led to the development of cloud computing, which earned Licklider the honorary title of “Father of Cloud Computing”.

Undeniably, cloud computing made backing up data much simpler and easier. For one thing, it doesn’t require the nightly ministrations of a computer operator shuffling disk packs. But it has its own issues. The term “cloud” refers to a symbol of an unknown domain. It’s amorphous. Your data, your personal information is routed to servers managed by a third party. Where exactly is it? Who exactly is managing it? How safe is it? If you can access it, so can hackers. And given the vicissitudes of climate change, what type of natural disaster would your data likely survive? All you know for certain is that it’s not on a backup pack sitting in your computer room.

While most businesses can get by storing their data in the cloud, there are some things too valuable, too precious, too rare to be entrusted to vaporous storage. For those items there is the Arctic World Archive. Welcome to data on ice, or rather data in ice.

Three hundred meters below the permafrost on the Norwegian Archipelago of Svalbard, in a coal mine abandoned three decades ago, some of the world’s most valuable data is locked in shipping containers.

Cultural and historic documents, literature, art – including the iconic 1893 painting “The Scream” by Norway’s own Edvard Munch – music, movies, technology, all the world’s open source code, and even manuscripts from the Vatican library have found their way to the Arctic World Archive. In all, it holds deposits from 30 countries, including data from governments, researchers, and corporations.

The location of the archive has a number of advantages beyond the fact that it’s very cold, and therefore requires no cooling system. For a facility that purports to safeguard data for hundreds if not thousands of years, remoteness is an essential virtue. Nestled between Norway and the Arctic, it’s far away from the ravages of war, the mindless destruction of terrorism, and the carnage of natural disasters. And, if you can tolerate the extreme cold and winters without daylight, Svalbard is a great place to enjoy the Northern Lights. Unlike much of the rest of the world, the islands are demilitarized with a population of just over 2,500 residents. They are regulated by international treaties and agreements which, sad to say, doesn’t mean much these days. Not even in our country.

But neither cold, nor remote location alone, can prevent digital data from deteriorating and eventually becoming unreadable. At the Arctic World Archive, data is stored on a mechanism that is completely immutable. It essentially protects data from the devices on which it currently exists becoming obsolete. Designed to last for centuries and beyond, a unique, resilient film called piqlFilm, encodes information using high-density QR codes. It guarantees both long-term preservation and future access. The piqlFilm is designed to be technologically independent, meaning it can be read even if present day technologies are unavailable in the future, or if future technologies are incompatible. The film can be read using a simple light source and basic tools.

What some distant generation will make of our precious data is anyone’s guess. There is some irony in the fact that they will find it in a cold, dry, dark, remote, abandoned coal mine. They will also find instructions and guides to interpreting the archive written in English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi.

What they won’t find is a framed platter from an ancient disk pack with about a third of its surface scraped off by a head crash. We hung it on the wall in the computer room to remind the staff of the importance of doing backups.

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