The largest web service for hosting and collaborative development of IT projects GitHub recorded 21TB of data with code on 186 film rolls. The archive with the records was placed in the Arctic Code Vault, located in an abandoned coal mine in the mountains of Spitsbergen, at a hundreds of meters’ depth, in the permafrost layer.
The data will stay there for at least a thousand years and is intended for future generations. At the same time, it is reported that the repository is part of another, larger repository – the Arctic World Archive, which was opened back in March 2017 and in which bobbins from different countries are stored. It is also noted that there is another repository nearby, in which plant samples have been stored since 2008.
As GitHub explained, a special guide is attached to the archive that allows to determine the location of each project, and also explains how to recover the data.
“Each reel includes a copy of the GitHub code repository guide in five languages. One reel contains technical history and cultural value, which we call the tech tree. The archive consists of papers selected to provide a detailed understanding of modern computing, open source and its applications, modern software developments, popular programming languages, and so on. This will allow the heirs of the archive to better understand our world and its technologies and even help to recreate computers to use the archived software”, GitHub said in a statement.
Text: Mikhail Tuaev, Photo: github.blog
