Making Computer Backups - On Paper?!

Almost all backup solutions run into the same problem eventually--the media decays, software ceases to work properly on newer systems or the hardware used to make the backup is unavailable.

Paper tends to hold up fairly well even over long periods of time. And you can always print your information, but that takes up a lot of room and doesn't work well for every type of information. Plus, it usually has to be re-entered.

PaperBack (available from http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/) is a solution to this. It encodes computer files into barcode patterns that are printed on paper. You can later restore them by scanning them back in to a computer.

Although the developer seems to consider the program a "joke", it really does work as this video shows you.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• computer
• PaperBack
• backups
• to
• paper
• barcoded
• format

[biopower4t]

Is this how computers looked and people backed their up stuff way, way, way back in 2009? Wow... Times have changed...

[uxwbill]

@biopower4t Yeah, we have it good now. The world is even in color these days!

[AlexxSR]

Windows 3.2? :)

[uxwbill]

@AlexxSR Windows 3.2 was a Chinese language only release.

[WinVistaUser2]

Hey man, on my computer, I have over 100GB of data backup and files that are important on my 1TB HDD running Windows 7 Pro. Does PaperBack support file backup if a hard drive has over 100GB of data/backup?

[uxwbill]

@WinVistaUser2 You're going to need a LOT of paper. In your case, PaperBack is not the best option. (It is best suited to backing up a few very important files.)

[Ajaces]

Definitely a unique nifty idea, which I never knew even existed. Thanks for bringing it to our attention Uxwbill.

[ThisIs2009]

wow that's cool :-)

[war4life3000]

lol i worked for me!!

[uxwbill]

@Xtrasmall1510 It's more a question of "how much paper do you have". This works best for smaller files.

[Lachlant1984]

I remember years ago hearing about a program called PaperDisk, it did pretty much this same thing, I never used it though, but I found it really interesting, this would have been about 11 or 12 years ago.

[AlexxSR]

@uxwbill 3.11 my bad

[AlexxSR]

@uxwbill 3.11 My bad!