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#Paper file storage software#
#Paper file storage zip#
#Paper file storage free#

High-quality paper with good ink regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal conditions.Īnother bonus is that ink on paper is readable by humans. If and when the CD-R and/or tape cassette and/or USB key and/or hard drive the secret key is stored on becomes unusable, the paper copy can be used to restore the secret key.įor paper, on the other hand, to claim it will last for 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. Most of the storage media in use today do not have particularly good long-term (measured in years to decades) retention of data. A paper backup also isn't a replacement for the usual machine readable (tape, CD-R, DVD-R, etc) backups, but rather as an if-all-else-fails method of restoring a key. There are countless ways to store something securely. The goal with paper is not secure storage.

#Paper file storage software#

There's even software for this purpose, PaperKey: But there is at least one legitimate use for this stuff, the trusted paper key. This may all seem a bit fanciful, since the alphabet is about all us poor human machines can reasonably deal with, at least not without the assistance of a computer and scanner. Sure, it's still paper, but the digital "alphabet" you're putting on that paper is a far more sophisticated way to store the underlying data than traditional ASCII text.

encryption - to prevent the image from being readable by anyone except the intended recipient.

redundancy - in case part of the image becomes damaged or is otherwise unreadable.

compression - to increase the amount of data stored in a given area.

PaperBack, like many of the other visual encodings listed above, includes provisions for: What you need is a scanner attached to your PC. Of course, bitmaps produced by PaperBack are also human-readable (with the small help of any decent microscope). And even the most weird encodings, like CDC or EBCDIC, were readable by humans (I mean, by real programmers). And used cards were good as notepads, too. inconvenient, but hey, only real programmers dared to write applications that large. Do you remember punched cards? For years, cards were the main storage medium for the source code. You must insert your medium into the drive, if you even have one, and try to read it. However, by looking on CD or magnetic tape, you are not able to tell whether your data is readable or not.

#Paper file storage zip#

You may ask - why? Why, for heaven's sake, do I need to make paper backups, if there are so many alternative possibilities like CD-R's, DVDÂ±R's, memory sticks, flash cards, hard disks, streaming tapes, ZIP drives, network storage, magneto-optical cartridges, and even 8-inch double-sided floppy disks formatted for DEC PDP-11? The answer is simple: you don't. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on a single sheet.

#Paper file storage free#

PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on ordinary paper in the form of oversized bitmaps. That's where programs like PaperBack come in: It has a ton of wasted data storage space. Paper the way we typically use it is criminally inefficient. Varies by # of color and density up to 3,500 characters per square inch The alphabet is no different than any other optical machine readable input, except the machines are us.īut how efficient is the alphabet at encoding information on a page? Consider some of the alternatives - different visual representations of data you could print on a page, or display on a monitor: I'm talking about visual encoding - translating the visual glyphs of the alphabet you're reading right now. But there's another sort of encoding at work here, one we process so often and so rapidly that it's invisible to us, and we forget about it. As programmers, we regularly work with text encodings.