You are a stranded time traveler on a mission to retreive 100 Terabytes of important historical information to save the future; How would you get this data intact into 100 years in the future?

Release the data on the public internet in an encrypted form. With the data, include a message openly admitting you're a time traveler. Include predictions of events that are relatively resistant to the butterfly effect and will have little effect on the time stream. For example, I would include a long list of future supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena. Such data would accelerate the field of astronomy a bit, but it wouldn't really affect life on Earth much. And it would prove that you're either a time traveler or someone with access to FTL travel technology. In your message, tell people the data is of vital importance to the future of humanity and that it will be needed in a crucial hour.

There will be enough people who preserve a copy of the data and pass it along to their children and grandchildren. Forget relying on technical solutions. This is one you can rely on people for. Unless there's some complete collapse of technological society, the data will be preserved.

Nice try, enemy time travel team checking the fediverse archives a hundred years from now.

Setup a company who's job it is to maintain the data. They make money by offering the same services to others, but their main aim is the preservation of this 100TB. Only people passing stringent security checks will know of this special mission. Enemies from the future will be scared away by a sign on the door reading "BEWARE OF THE TIGER".

They will run massive NetApp arrays and redundant ZFS pools. They will rotate disks out periodically and migrate onto newer technologies as and when. Backups will be taken, verified and tested monthly. Basically it's Backblaze but running for 100 years.

10 encrypted mdisc addressed to the good guys buried in as many 100year time capsules as possible.

alternatively just give it to the time traveller sent to retrieve you.

alternatively the future needs this data because you failed and you need to accept this is how things always happen.

Create a torrent file named RockyHorrorPictureShow_Outtakes_TaylorSwift and release it to the internet.

My first thought went to those M-Disk/BDXL bluray disks which supposed to last 1000 years if you believe the claims. So with 100gb per disk you would need atleast 1000 disks. Probably more since the data probably wont perfectly fill out each disk. Writing to optical media is slow and according to the very first searchresult i found it takes upwards of 3hrs to write and verify a single disk. So with a single drive it would take atleast north of 3000 hours if nothing goes wrong. A year has ~8760 hours btw. Oh boi.

But i wouldnt want to rely on a single copy of each disk. If the data is so important i would like to have atleast 10 copies? So the year would probably consist of only maintaining and repairing several burning rigs and going through like 35.000 edit: 11.000 blurays and then finding spots to safely store them.

But how will they read the data of the disks in the future? Blurays and todays data formats most likely wont exist anymore. So you would need several redundant PCs with bluray drives which hopefully last that long. The HDD/SSD wont last in them. Linux live disks burned on the blurays? On top foolproof documentation how to operate all that ancient shit.

My head hurts

I set up like a million dead drops, craigslist entries and graffitti telling the other time travellers to come pick me up where I am. As long as one makes it I will get an instant pickup materializing next to me instantly and can carry whatever server rack I'm salvaging inside their DeLorean or TARDIS or whatever. Bonus points, I get to survive. Extra bonus points, let's go to the place the other guys jumped me and bootstrap their asses into the curb.

I get that the idea is chatting about how to preserve data, but time travel breaks every premise if you think about it for two minutes.

Claim it's some secret govt data, then all the conspiracy theorists will archive it. Especially after misterously dying onr year later!

Print it out at work and leave it on the printer.

Easy. Copy the data into several different mediums and store them as safely as I can. Bury half of them in time capsules set to be dug up in 100 years and then start a cult based around duplicating and passing the data down through the generations. Hopefully one of those two methods insures that at least one whole copy of the 100tb of data survives the 100 years.

100 years ain't that long tbh. Seal it in a glass jar and put it somewhere cool and dry, like a cave, and it'll be fine.

Does it only need to be discovered by the people 100 years in the future, or can people before that be aware of it?

Because this reminds me of the nuclear waste protection research. You found a religion that fears glowing cats....

Some type of data crystal/diamond sneak it in to or on to a piece of art or jewelry in a museum somehow or maybe stash it in a statue or graveyard someplace that’ll persist and most likely won’t be changed much if at all for that amount of time. The organization that sent me on this mission surely had a dead drop contingency plan they have time traveling tech. Or I leave a clue carved in stone on the grounds of the one day HQ hoping they get the clue and can swap the data crystal out later. 🤷‍♂️

Break it into overlapping chunks, encode it as nucleic acid base pairs, and splice it into the genomes of a bunch of soil bacteria.

LTO9 tapes with LTFS

What medium is the data already on?

Oh sure - I tell you, you tell somebody else, next thing every time traveller is doing it.

"Back to the Future, Part 2" tells me law firms will hold and deliver things.

Easy enough for future time travelers to protect data from themselves until certain dates.

Enemy time travelers? Gotta keep the "how", "where" and "when" quiet forever. Keeping it boring will keep it from being repeated.

Use lasers to create bubbles in large chunks of glass. Duplicate a few times on a few far flung continents, including Arctic/Antarctica.

As a time traveler I expect to have knowledge of what readers exists. verbatim makes archival grade DVD, blu-ray, and CD media guaranteed to last 100 years. Put copies on a couple different time capsules and I'm good. However I don't have much confidence that media readers for any of this will exist. Even if I put a reader in the time capsule I'm not confident it will survive - the media will be good but the mechanics probably are lost to corrosion, so this is the most important part.

Does it really need to be all 100tb? Can I find a small subset that matters? We have history of payrus scrolls with the correct ink that have a proven history of lasting thousands of years when left in a desert garbage dump. You can find the recipe for making both the scrolls and the ink in the bible. Copy by hand, leave in the desert, in a location I know archeologists will dig in 100 years. This is very limited amounts of data that can be saved though.

If the above doesn't work, non-acid paper when laser printed (not inkjet!) should last plenty long. Again I don't think I can get anywhere near your 100tb, but I remain convinced everything we need can be archived on it.

How experimental are we going? There's some cool research into laser etching data into crystal cubes. That should be very stable, but I don't know how you'd get to the tech.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

Write whole 100TB of 0s and 1s into clay tablets. I might need some help with logistics

Important question. Is this a 1 traveler vs multiple travelers situation or can I have teammates as well?

You know what? I don't even need teammates. I'm going to start a HUGE mass awareness campaign (it will be on the news, uploaded as a torrent on everywhere, etc.) for people to selfhost this data on their system and compensating them automatically by a script system with a fuck ton of money. The script will check if the data is still is in it's original state every month, and if it is then those selfhosters will get a lot of cash as a compensation. Ofc this script checking system will run on a bunch of different servers, like on thousands of raspberry pi 473883 chips located all over the world, so the time travellers won't find all of these verification systems in time.

Store it optically in a single fused quartz crystal that is available today, then get that crystal put into an exoplanet lander going : Venus, Mercury or perhaps large moons like Titan or the Jovian moons.

We have a the technology today to send stuff to these far off places, but no ability to bring it back. In 100 years time there likely would be the technology. So even if "the enemy" knew I sent it to Titan and knew exactly where it was, they couldn't read it.

I guess it depends on what sort of data is in this 100 TB data set. And if I have any other tools at my disposal to transcribe the data into new mediums or any time adjacent knowledge for things that would happen in the next year.

If there was an accurate almanac, lunar calendar of events or current world/local history. Establishing myself as some sort of prophet, messiah or divine messenger should be possible. Once I establish that I can see the future, then I need to make a far flung prediction for my home time that "will be revealed when the time is right".

Four important rules would needed to make it work.

• Primarily a foundational tennat not to alter my prophecy. I am the one and only prophet that will ever exist. Of course schisms and reformations will likely occur but so long as the "orthodox" faithful preserve my original writings it should stand the test of time.

• Secondly, depending on how my death occurs in "exactly one year", I can work that in to the cannon as being recalled to the higher plane. Especially if this time death is flashy! Hopefully something like my body being ripped apart by the time stream. Nice big event that will be remembered.

• Thirdly, I protect my religious with good ole fashion reliable xenophobia! Whatever tools I can use to identify competing time travelers will be the sign of heretics and evil demons.

• Finally, that my tomb is to contain both my original manuscripts that are never to be touched or altered. And importantly, exact prophecies that are supposed to be opened prior to various major world events. If I can sprinkle a good one every 20 years or so then the faith should remain strong.

Based on the past, it seems vinyl records are near indestructible. So, embedding the data in that somehow and keeping it cool might work.

Printed might also work but it's a lot of data. Microfiche maybe?

Another option might be to use some form of nuclear battery to keep a bunch of multi TB SSDs powered up.

Nice try enemy time traveler!

Putting a comment here to commemorate when I initially interacted with the time travellers.