A plan to expand a physical backup of the world鈥檚 most widely used open-source software held inside a mountain in the Arctic will go ahead this month, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
GitHub, an online software host聽owned by Microsoft, has already stored the equivalent of 10,000 folders聽of source code files in Coal Mine 3, a disused facility on聽the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway.
This month, the company will hugely expand its existing storage by adding repositories that can hold another 100 million folders 鈥� the equivalent of 5000 hours of movies. This will include all the open-source code it currently holds that is already backed up on聽servers around the world.
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Thomas Dohmke at GitHub says that given the uncertainty created by the coronavirus outbreak, increasing the company鈥檚 means of preserving the data feels 鈥渕ore important than ever鈥�. The use of open-source software has grown hugely in the past decade: now more than 90聽per cent of all software projects depend on it聽to聽some extent, he says.
鈥淲e think it is important to preserve for future generations,鈥� says Dohmke. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not so much about a nuclear strike, or a comet hitting the Earth, or some pandemic. It鈥檚聽more about creating an opportunity for future generations to study how software development worked in the early 2000s, in the same way that we study what the Romans built 2000 years ago, and we relearn things that we had forgotten.鈥�
Despite the global disruption the pandemic has caused, GitHub is still on track to do the work in April, says Dohmke. The files will聽be stored as QR codes on film聽made in the Norwegian city聽of聽Drammen by data storage firm .
The existing GitHub backup is聽held on one reel of film, which sits on a shelf at the same unstaffed facility, safe behind an unassuming pair of grey doors located off an access tunnel to the聽mine. Once the new聽backup is聽added, there will be聽around 200聽reels.
GitHub will include a guide, or聽鈥渢ech tree鈥�, for each reel of film, so that what is stored on it can be聽interpreted later. 鈥淓ven if you come in 1000 years and you have no idea what open-source or software development ever was, you can use that tech tree to understand it,鈥� says Dohmke.
The film is designed to last a millennium in the permafrost of Svalbard. Yet global warming and weather changes have already forced a 鈧�20 million upgrade of another Arctic storage project, a nearby global seed vault, after its entrance flooded in October 2016 due to heavy rainfall and melting permafrost.
Dohmke says it isn鈥檛 clear whether climate change poses a threat to the safety of the backup. 鈥淭he honest answer is, I don鈥檛 know. Maybe not. Maybe it is, time will tell,鈥� he says.
Other technologies in development, such as Microsoft鈥檚 , which uses lasers to store data in quartz glass discs, could last for 10,000 years and should be ready in the next two years, says Dohmke.
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