Most of our modern culture is stored digitally, which means historians in the distant future may know more about the ancient civilizations than any of us now. Even today, people have a hard time getting data off an old floppy disk. Just imagine, how can someone get useful information out of a long-broken computer? But they still can from stone carvings. It’s like, everything that defines us now is intangible, stored in an unsafe online environment and confined within the limits of storage technology that works today but will likely be non-existent by the next decade. It may seem like the internet is recording every second of everybody’s history, but the truth is that it’s vulnerable to being lost in a disaster.
For this reason, organizations, governments, and companies have designated backup storage locations in safe and remote places in efforts to preserve the world’s information for future generations. One of the largest is known as the Arctic World Archive (AWA), established in 2017; it contains a collection of irreplaceable digital artifacts from over 15 contributing nations.
Located deep inside an arctic mountain on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway, the archive includes data from the National Archives of Brazil, Mexico, the Vatican Library, the European Space Agency, and many corporations and museums. It is a safe, remote location with cool, dry permafrost conditions that help increase the longevity of the stored data. Also, resilient long-term storage technology is used that can last for a thousand years.
Now, GitHub, the world’s largest software repository with over 100 million repositories and 37 million users, has archived 21 TB of public open-source data in the AWA. The GitHub Arctic Code Vault will preserve open-source software for future generations to ensure that the world’s software heritage – the cornerstone of our modern world – is preserved for centuries to come.
The AWA received GitHub’s 186 reels of piqlFlim to be stored beneath 250m (820ft) of permafrost in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault on July 8, 2020. That data consists of a snapshot of all active public repositories on GitHub as of February 2, 2020.
The pictures were encoded in the form of tiny QR codes and imprinted onto archival film reels (piqlFilm – digital photosensitive archival film), which is made of silver halide on polyester and designed to last for 1,000 years. This deposit makes GitHub one of the significant contributors to the AWA.
