Visit the Arctic vault holding back-ups of great works

Top of the Northern Antarctic Circle, the Svalbard archipelago is located in the middle of the road between the mainland Norway and the Northern Pole.

Frozen, mountain, and distant, is home to hundreds of polar bears and two separate settlements.

One of these is Longyearbyenen, the northern city of the world, and directly outside the settlement, in the coal mine that has been stopped, is the world archive in the Arctic (AWA) – underground cellar for data.

Customers are pushing to store their data on the film and keep it in a cellar, for hundreds of possible years.

“This is a place to ensure that the information still escapes from technological statute of limitations, time and aging. This is our mission,” says the founder of Rune Bjerkestrand, who leads the road inward.

When the head is turned on, we got a dark corridor and we followed the old railway tracks 300 meters on the side of the mountain, until we reached the metal archive door.

Inside a cellar, a firm charging container stands with silver packages, each containing rollers of films, on which the data is stored.

“It is a lot of memories, and a lot of heritage,” says Mr. Perksterland.

“It is anything of digital art pieces, literature, music, and animation, called it whatever you want.”

Since the launch of the archive eight years ago, more than 100 deposits have been presented by institutions, companies and individuals, from 30 countries.

Among the many digital manufactures, there are 3D scannings and models of Taj Mahal; Old manuscripts slices from the Vatican Library; Satellite notes to the Earth from space; And the dear Norway painting, The Scream, by Edofard Monk.

AWA is a commercial process and depends on the technology provided by the Norwegian Data preservation company, PIQL, which is also headed by Mr. Bjerkestrand.

It was inspired by the global seed cellar, a seed bank is located only a few hundred meters away, and it is a warehouse that can recover crops after natural or human -made disasters.

“Today, there are a lot of risks to information and data,” said Mr. Berkstand. “There is terrorism, war, and electronic infiltrators.”

According to him, Svalbard is the perfect place, to host a safe facility to store data.

“It is far from everything! Far from wars, crisis, terrorism and disasters. What can be safer!”

Under the ground it is dark, dry and cold, with temperatures remaining without zero throughout the year; Conditions that Mr. Bjerkestrand claims to maintain the safety of the film for centuries.

If global warming causes the soil of the soil in the thick Arctic, the cellar is still strong enough to maintain its contents.

At the back of the room, another large metal box contains the cellar code.

The Birchi software developer has hundreds of open source instrument instructions here, which are the construction blocks on which computer operating systems, programs, websites and applications are based.

Programming languages, artificial intelligence tools and every active public warehouse are also stored on its basic system, which was written by 150 million users, here.

“It is very important for humanity to secure the future of software, it has become important to our daily life.”

He said that his company had explored a variety of long -term storage solutions, and there are challenges. “Some of our current mechanisms can be stored for a very long time, but you need a technique to read it.”

At PIQL headquarters in southern Norway, data files are coded on a sensitive movie.

“Data is a series of bitch and peitters,” showing the chief developer of the products, Alexei Mantasif, as the film was passing through a ball within his reach.

“We convert the sequence of bits that come from our customers’ data into pictures. Each picture [or frame] About eight million pixels. “

Once these images are displayed and developed, the processed film looks gray, but it is displayed more closely, as it looks like a small QR icon block.

The information cannot be deleted or changed, and it can be easily recovered. Mr. Mantsev explains.

“We can wipe it again, and decode the data in the same way as reading the data from a fixed drive, but we will read the data from the movie.”

One of the main questions arising from long -term storage methods, is whether people will understand what has been preserved and how to recover, centuries in the future.

This is a scenario that PIQL thought, and therefore a visually enlarged and brilliant guide is printed, on the movie as well.

Every day more data is used and generated more than ever, but experts have long warned of a Possible “Digital Dark Age”As technological developments make software and previous devices old.

This may mean the files and formats that we use now, and they face a fate similar to flexible tablets and DVD drives from the past.

Many companies provide long -term data storage.

The magnetic tapes known as LTO (open linear tape) are the most common shape, but the latest innovations are a revolution in how to maintain information.

For example, Silica from Microsoft Project has developed parts of 2 mm thick glass, on which parts of data are transferred by powerful laser.

Meanwhile, a team of scientists from Southampton University created the alleged 5D memory, which saved a record of the human genome.

This was also placed in Human warehouse anniversaryAnother cellar protects historical documents, hidden in a salt mine in Austria.

The archive of the world in the Arctic receives the deposits three times a year, and as BBC visited, extinction language recordings and manuscripts for the mosque Schoban were among the latest rollers placed in a cellar.

The photographer, Christian Chloers, who was documenting the South Pacific Islands, was threatened by sea level rise, adding his work.

“The footage, photography, and visual witnesses of the Marshall Islands have been deposited,” he says.

“The highest point on the island is three meters, and they face a major impact on climate change.”

“It was really modest and surreal,” says Joan Schurland, head of the heritage groups at Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, after depositing records and engineers ’drawings and pictures in historical car models.

“I have all these formats that have become old.

“You need to change the file format and make sure that it can be accessed in 20 or 30 years, and the digital world faces many problems.”