Cold Storage & Personal Data: Tick, Tick, Tick

[Updated on September 29, 2015]

[This post is a hopeless plug for my new book Understanding Personal Data Security. It’s said that there are two high-level categories of emotional exploitation within most advertising: Greed and fear. In this post, I exploit fear.]


I write a lot about electric vehicles, home theater, and personal data security. My grandmother always told me to do what I know. There’s a reason I’m not teaching you how to replace the tranny in your Ford F-150 or giving you advice for that Sunday casserole.

In personal data security, I try to write about topics that center around the real world. Strong passwords, data backup, centralized data storage. That type of thing. The areas of data archival and backup are especially fun. So simple in theory, yet so neglected and difficult in practice. The majority of us (well over 50%) never—as in never—backup our data. It’s truly mind blowing.

nfc chips in hands

Yet here we are, a culture that totes sleek smartphones and tablets and captures almost exclusively digital photos and video. Instead of going to Walgreens to develop old school film, we upload JPEG images from our mobile devices directly to cloud-based social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr. All while our kids indulge in Kik, Snapchat, Vine, and stuff we’ve never heard of.

Middle class Americans create a lot of data; more and more every day. As an increasing number of us acquire highly capable mobile devices, we automatically begin snapping high-resolution photos and capturing high-definition video—along with meta data like location and people tagging. Just more ones and zeroes. We throw our files up in the cloud, sync with a local computer, or simply ignore our increasingly large treasure trove of digital delights. What was once expensive and somewhat rare is now cheap and plentiful. In the old days, no middle class consumer could afford 100,000 print photos or dozens of hours of home movies.

Now I have those thousands of photos and hundreds of videos sitting on a $200 NAS device on my home network. Amazing. We’re all curators and archivists today, whether we realize it or not.

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Once, back in ’06 or so, I had a hard drive crash on a server computer in my home. Just so happens that server was storing all of my family photos. I shipped it to a special recovery service in Atlanta. But they delivered sad news: It was toast. Unrecoverable. 16 years of family photos down the crapper. Gone.


Fortunately, I had a backup. The problem? It was five months old. So yes, I recovered nearly 16 years worth of precious heirloom family photos, videos, and personal data files. The term “relief” doesn’t begin to explain how I felt. But I was still kicking myself for having lost nearly half a year’s worth of digital data.

I’m a picture fiend. We used to be called shutter bugs (back when most cameras featured physical shutters). I love to take tons of casual, unplanned photos on nearly a daily basis. For some people, five months of photos isn’t much. For me, it was thousands of shots and a chunk of the lives of my daughters that I’ll never retrieve. As in never.

A valuable lesson, to say the least. Now you know why I preach about offsite backups and redundant data. Because what happened to me happens to most people. Except most people lose everything.

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I recently joined the artsy no-ads social network Ello. I’m really enjoying the wealth of photography, art, sculptures, 3D-printed objects, poetry, and writing. But the reality is that the vast majority of this creative expression is stored digitally. Statistically, roughly half of this data will eventually be lost to digital devastation. A hard drive will crash. A laptop will be stolen. A fire or flood will occur. Nasty crap. But it happens every day.

And the data will go “poof.” Forever lost. Notice how I keep saying “forever” in terms of lost data and “never” in terms of how often people backup that precious data?

securityWith my head in this mode of OCD data protection, a recent article in Ars Technica naturally caught my attention. A Dutch entrepreneur, Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet), had an NFC (Near Field Communication) chip implanted in each hand. The purpose? To securely store data.

Ironically, this is called “cold storage.” Because of the NFC, this data isn’t static. Using any of dozens of common smartphones or tablets on the market that feature NFC capabilities, this man can update the data stored on the chips in his hands.

Pretty damn cool. Now, I realize a lot of you are getting squeamish at the prospect of having radio frequency-capable memory chips implanted in your body. Can’t say I blame you there (although I think I’d be willing to do this).

But squeamishness aside, why is cold storage so cool? Because it partially deals with the issue of “offsite” backup. Remember 9/11? Remember all the companies that went bankrupt after the physical devastation? Know why most of them went under? They lost all of their customer data. And they lost all of their customer data because their backups were stored onsite.

Cold storage solves this problem. To a certain extent. It’s an interesting model, one where the data resides wherever you happen to be. Home, office, coffee shop, a friend’s house, driving down the 404. Now, I do want to clarify that this man is storing Bitcoin data and the small (2 x 12 millimeters) capsules injected between his thumb and index finger contain very little information. It’s basically just a few bank account numbers. Then again, a photo is just a few (million) pixels with location markers and color assignments.

We all know how this story ends. Storage capacities in all forms of modern media have expanded at an exponential rate. Eventually, these small flesh-injected capsules will sport enough storage to backup all of your personal photos and videos. At which time you’ll have yet another backup option and opportunity to safely archive your precious personal data.

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Until we all get these flesh-based flash drives, however, we still have an ever-increasing volume of valuable personal data that is lost on a daily basis. To date, roughly one-third of computers have crashed and lost all of their data; as in, this has already happened! So, once again, I must reiterate my personal mantra of offsite backup. Weekly, monthly…whatever. You know your habits. I’m not going to tell you how frequently to backup your data. You’re an adult. You wear big girl and big boy pants.

However, what I will tell you: If you don’t make two backup copies of those special memories of your kids, pets, and special events and get them offsite, you’ll eventually lose them. It’s statistically inevitable. Look at the clock on your smartphone or watch and take note of the second hand.

It’s counting down to digital disaster. Tick, tick, tick. Goodbye data. Au revoir precious memories.

The digital demons are coming to get you.

For the time being, you can avoid getting a data capsule stored in your hand. But if you blow off multiple backup copies of your personal data—one of which goes offsite—you won’t avoid losing all of your photos and videos.

Just sayin’.

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Curt Robbins

Curt Robbins is author of the following books from Amazon Kindle:
