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Protect Your Data With Optical Storage
00:12:00
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| Alright, listen carefully. | |
| I've got a hugely important tip for you that's going to save your ass in the next natural disaster, EMP attack, grid down scenario, cyber warfare attack, whatever. | |
| Here's, you know, all of us have to make backups, right? | |
| Whether we're individuals, we make backups of our favorite photos, I guess, or whatever you have on your computer. | |
| And if you're a company, you're, of course, making backups of all this mission-critical business data. | |
| And, you know, if you're some kind of online service provider, you're making backups constantly. | |
| Or if you're a bank, even, right? | |
| Everything's in a database or hundreds of databases. | |
| And you're making backups. | |
| Now, most people are making backups onto magnetic media. | |
| Magnetic media includes hard drives and backup tape and also flash drives or flash SD cards or solid state drives, SSDs, right? | |
| Now all of these devices, oh and by the way, the point of this talk is that you're making a huge mistake. | |
| It's all going to be wiped out. | |
| All your backups are going to be gone if there's an EMP attack. | |
| It's going to destroy all your data. | |
| But I have a solution for you and that's what I'm going to mention. | |
| But let's understand the physics involved here. | |
| Magnetic storage uses little tiny magnets on the heads of the hard drive, for example. | |
| To put a charge on a very tiny magnetic particle that's on the surface of the hard drive, the platter that's spinning. | |
| It has a lot of little bits, and those bits are pushed into either a positive or negative magnetic direction. | |
| Maybe it's positive and neutral. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm not a hard drive designer, but let's just call it positive or negative. | |
| It's a bit, right? | |
| And it's changed electromagnetically. | |
| Now, the very high storage hard drives that we have today, very high storage density, where one little tiny drive can store, you know, four terabytes, which is astonishing. | |
| It accomplishes this by having really, really tiny bits. | |
| I mean, physically super small. | |
| And very, very tiny changes in the electrical polarity of those bits that's being induced by the head. | |
| The writing head. | |
| And then being read later by the same head reading. | |
| Well, because these bits are so tiny, they're incredibly sensitive to electromagnetic interference. | |
| Hard drives are also sensitive to electromagnetic degradation. | |
| A hard drive just sitting there that's not being scrubbed, as it's called in the industry, will start to lose data bits. | |
| Now, I know a lot of people don't think about this. | |
| They don't understand that hard drives, if you just put them on the shelf for five years and then you try to read the files, you may be missing like 2% of all the bits, which for a lot of files makes them unreadable. | |
| So hard drives use what are called parity bits. | |
| To help reconstruct lost data, this is really part of the low-level hard drive writing and reading protocol. | |
| Parity is used throughout. | |
| It's parity, P-A-R-I-T-Y, not parody like satire. | |
| Ha ha ha, isn't that funny? | |
| You lost a bit. | |
| No, it's a checksum, basically. | |
| Data integrity. | |
| You think that you have safely stored your data because let's say you have a RAID 5 array on a central storage server in your company. | |
| You think you're rocking. | |
| You've got a backup system. | |
| You've got a hot spare hard drive on your RAID system. | |
| Maybe two hot spares. | |
| You're all set. | |
| Your data can't be lost. | |
| It's being stored on this kick-ass RAID storage server. | |
| Totally redundant. | |
| Or hey, you've stored some of it in the cloud too. | |
| Well, guess what? | |
| In the cloud, your data is probably stored on hard drives. | |
| Somewhere, on some server, somewhere across the country, hard drives that use little tiny magnetic bits, just like your hard drive at home. | |
| Now, an EMP weapon is not only capable of frying the electronics of the interfaces, that is the circuitry that controls the hard drive. | |
| EMP If it's strong enough, it may also alter the data on your hard drive. | |
| Remember, all it takes is a strong enough magnetic field to erase the data on your hard drive. | |
| That's how you do some erasing, is you take a very strong magnet You wipe the hard drive with a strong magnet, thereby destroying all the data on it. | |
| This is one of the ways that you cleanse hard drives before throwing them away, let's say. | |
| Now, an EMP weapon may not have that strong of a magnetic field as a handheld device, but it only needs to degrade your data by, let's say, 5% to really make your files largely unreadable, or 10%. | |
| And nobody knows for sure exactly How strong of an electromagnetic field it takes to destroy hard drives. | |
| But if your data is on magnetic media, you're taking that risk. | |
| And it's an unknown risk because we don't know exactly what voltage potential is going to be rippling down through the atmosphere in an EMP weapon attack. | |
| So what's the solution? | |
| The solution is optical storage. | |
| Optical storage, which includes DVDs or Blu-ray DVDs, You know, writable Blu-ray, or at the high end, something like a Sony optical drive, which is like a $5,000 drive, that can hold, I think, like one, one and a half terabytes, something like that, on a cartridge. | |
| Optical storage is immune to EMP. Optical storage is immune to fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. | |
| Now an EMP can fry the interface electronics of an optical drive, but it can't fry the media. | |
| Optical uses a laser to alter the reflective pattern of tiny little bits of, let's call it plastic, on the surface of the media. | |
| In other words, if you take a DVD, there are tiny little bits in the plastic that are either turned on or off by writing on those bits using a laser, a right head. | |
| And then any kind of reading head can read which bits are on or off because of their reflectance potential in reflecting a laser at a certain wavelength. | |
| And that's why Blu-ray is called Blu-ray because it uses a laser at the wavelength that's typically called blue, which is a smaller wavelength, meaning you have a tighter resolution of bits on the media itself. | |
| Now, these drives also use parity bits like we talked about in electromagnetic media, meaning there is some data check some capability on the optical media as well. | |
| But the good news is you can take a Blu-ray disc or a DVD that you've stored all your family photos on or your business database or whatever you've stored it on. | |
| You can take this and you can throw it in the shower. | |
| You can wash it with water. | |
| You can get mud on it, wash it off, rinse it off, dry it off, stick it back in. | |
| It works. | |
| Optical media can survive a flood. | |
| It can survive quite a lot of heat, but not, obviously, melting heat. | |
| If you melt it, your data goes with the melting. | |
| However, it's quite resistant to heat, but most importantly, it's resistant to EMP and electromagnetic type of attacks. | |
| So if you're trying to protect something and you're storing whatever you're trying to protect on electromagnetic media, hard drives, tape, and so on, you're basically screwed in a sufficiently large EMP attack that sets off a strong enough electromagnetic wave to alter hard drive bits. | |
| And I don't know how strong that wave has to be I don't know the exact physics calculation. | |
| Maybe someone can offer that. | |
| But I know that there is a risk associated with it, and that risk is zero when it comes to optical media. | |
| So the simplest thing that you can do, probably your computer right now has a writable Blu-ray drive on it, and you can simply buy write-once or, I think, rewritable Blu-ray media. | |
| And you can start running backups onto that optical media. | |
| You can store that media. | |
| And that's going to really last a very long time. | |
| 10 years, 20 years? | |
| Easy. | |
| Maybe 50 years. | |
| Yeah, seriously. | |
| Where a hard drive after 50 years, it's garbage. | |
| It's useless. | |
| If you just write to a hard drive and set it on the shelf, and you try to read that hard drive 50 years later, forget it. | |
| Your data's gone. | |
| It's just eroded. | |
| But optical media? | |
| It's all still there. | |
| It's all still there. | |
| Not a lot of people are thinking about all this. | |
| This is one of the things that I do is I have a knack about thinking ahead, looking at the trends, seeing where things are going, solving future problems today. | |
| And of course, I'm into preparedness and my background is in software technology. | |
| So this is just an obvious thing that I wanted to share with you because it's something that I do. | |
| I store my backups on optical media. | |
| I don't trust hard drives, period. | |
| And I sure don't trust the cloud. | |
| Give me a break. | |
| The cloud. | |
| They call it the cloud because when something hits the fan, your data just floats away. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| It's gone. | |
| If you're storing anything in the cloud, I'm sorry to say, I don't want to be insulting, but everything you store in the cloud is being data mined by the NSA. You're being surveilled. | |
| You don't have control over it, so the cloud is for suckers. | |
| Let me just put it that way. | |
| Nobody in the backup business relies on the cloud. | |
| It's a joke and it's a surveillance nightmare. | |
| And it could be one component of a redundant data backup strategy, but it should never be the primary component. | |
| It could be like your last-ditch backup. | |
| And if you're storing in the cloud and you're not encrypting your files before you send them to the cloud, I'm sorry, you're an idiot, okay? | |
| You've got to encrypt. | |
|
Secure Storage Solutions
00:00:46
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| If you're not encrypting, you might as well just put all your data on a hard drive and just mail it to the NSA. Because they're reading everything. | |
| Okay, so be smart. | |
| Be smart. | |
| Be prepared. | |
| And learn about optical media. | |
| And then find a way to securely store that optical media locally where you can keep it very, very safe. | |
| Like in a safe place. | |
| A fireproof safe would be even better. | |
| So I hope this is helpful. | |
| Thanks for listening. | |
| Check out my work at Newstarget.com and my other Health Ranger Report podcasts at HealthRangerReport.com. | |
| Check out Glitch.News for news about EMP, cyber warfare, and other things. | |
| Glitch.News. | |
| That's the website. | |