Data Permanence: The New Way To Mitigate Data Loss, And Corruption
300 million terabytes of data are created every day and experts predict that global data creation is projected to grow to about 180 zettabytes by 2025, a number difficult for the human mind to even fully grasp.
A significant portion of this data — videos, social media content, messages, and emails — originates from users themselves. The rest are governmental records or information generated by devices like smartwatches and processes like transactions.
Now, this data is valuable for individuals and businesses alike and demands robust long-term protection and security measures. However, this is easier said than done.
Most data is stored in large data centers and dedicated servers or uploaded to the cloud. These services are centralized, which means a single hack or error can wipe out a large amount of data as seen with the GitLab incident.
Apart from damaging brand reputation and frustrating users – data loss incidents also cost businesses anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $15 million.
So, in this blog, we’ll look at why data permanence is important, what it constitutes, how onchain storage solutions can mitigate data loss and corruption, and how you can use Fleek to easily access onchain storage.
Now, What Is Data Permanence And Persistence?
When it comes to long-term data storage, data permanence, and persistence are often used synonymously. However, there is a clear distinction between the two and how they contribute to the long-term storage of data in a onchain setup.
Permanence is a guarantee for ensuring the stored data remains accessible and retrievable indefinitely.
Persistence is a guarantee for continuous storage and availability of data until it is voluntarily discarded.
The Need For Data Permanence And The Benefits Of Long-Term Storage
Long-term data storage holds a wealth of value for businesses; here’s a breakdown of why this is the case.
1. Historical Business Data Is A Company’s Lifeline
Without financial records, customer details, employee information, and trade secrets, a business will face severe obstacles in its daily operations, strategic planning, and building lasting customer relationships.
2. Data Management Is Crucial For Compliance
Robust long-term storage strategies enable businesses to maintain audit trails, comply with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR, and reduce the risk of legal and financial penalties.
3. Data Gives Companies A Competitive Advantage
Archiving large, decades-worth of datasets helps companies to uncover hidden trends, optimize processes, and develop insight-driven strategies using advanced machine learning technologies.
We’ve already mentioned centralized storage systems aren’t the best solution to mitigate data loss and build a long-term data management strategy as they’re prone to single points of failure.
That’s why, in the subsequent sections, we’re going to explore onchain storage alternatives and how they help with data permanence and persistence.
Understanding Onchain Data Storage
Onchain data storage involves distributing data across multiple nodes within a network while offering global and unified access to the stored data. This peer-to-peer topology mitigates single points of failure that are inherent in traditional data storage solutions. Key components for a onchain data storage solution include:
1. Distributed file system refers to the peer-to-peer file system built on nodes that replicate and store data. This system is responsible for enhancing data availability and fault tolerance by distributing data across nodes.
2. Node infrastructure is the network of nodes (computers) that communicate and exchange data without relying on a central server. Nodes contribute storage capacity to the network and facilitate data storage and retrieval.
3. Content addressing is the method used to locate data within the onchain storage network. CIDs or content identifiers form the crux of this mechanism.
4. Transport and content encryption ensure data integrity and privacy during data transfer (transport) and storage (content). These two encryption methods gatekeep unauthorized access and breaches.
5. Incentive mechanisms reward nodes that contribute storage bandwidth to the network. This is necessary to ensure data permanence in onchain storage networks.
Under The Hood Of Data Permanence — How Does It Work?
Now, let us understand how data permanence is made possible by onchain storage systems.
1. Redundant Storage
Onchain storage systems achieve data persistence through redundant storage across a global network of nodes. Data hosted or stored in the network is split, sharded, and replicated across the network. This redundancy mitigates risks of data loss from node failures and ensures that the stored data is made available through other nodes even if some nodes go offline.
2. Versioning and History
Content identifiers or CIDs help in the versioning and maintenance of data changes in a onchain storage system. For developers, this versioning capability is crucial as it maintains a detailed history of content updates and modifications.
Additionally, it allows for the recovery of previous data states, safeguarding against accidental or malicious deletions, and contributes to data persistence.
3. Security by Distribution
Onchain storage systems achieve security through distribution. Data is spread across nodes, and tasks like storage and retrieval are shared amongst nodes. This design makes it exceptionally difficult for attackers to compromise the network or access stored data.
4. Incentive Mechanisms
Data persistence in onchain networks is achieved through pinning services, where users request specific nodes to permanently store the designated data in exchange for rewards. This incentive mechanism attracts more nodes and expands the available storage capacity.
Where To Use Onchain Storage For Data Permanence?
After understanding what data permanence is and how it works, let us take a look at a few use cases that arise out of this:
- Archiving And Preservation Of Digital Assets
Historical records, cultural heritage, scientific data, and intellectual property can all be stored, archived, and preserved on onchain storage systems. Data permanence makes this possible, ensuring these digital assets remain secure, corruption-free, and retrievable, at ease.
This helps historical research, the perpetual transfer of information, and even cultural preservation.
- NFT Metadata Storage
NFTs or non-fungible tokens are digital assets with immense flexibility to represent art, real estate, tokens, identities, and more. Metadata is the lifeblood of NFTs as it contains the essential data regarding the token like its attributes, rarity, and utilities. Onchain storage of this metadata ensures the permanence of NFTs.
This facet of permanence might also unlock innovative functionalities and utilities for NFTs.
- Onchain Identity and Access Management
By storing identification documents, credentials, and more on an onchain network, individuals and businesses can safeguard their information and streamline online verification processes without relying on vulnerable centralized identity providers.
- Legal and Financial Documents Storage
Legal documents, contracts, and financial records demand security, long-term preservation, and immutability and onchain storage offers an ideal solution. Thanks to its distributed nature, it makes the documents stored on it tamper-proof and permanently accessible.
Plus, the immutable nature of onchain storage guarantees content immutability, making it ideal for property deeds, patents, trademarks, and any type of record.
Fleek: Adding Composability To Data Permanence
Anyone can access onchain storage solutions like IPFS, Arweave, and Filecoin through the Fleek.xyz UI, SDK, and CLI.
Additionally, we offer pinning services for IPFS making it easy for users to pin their content and make it available permanently, with a fallback on Filecoin. Our platform also automates CID management, ensuring any update to the content is reflected automatically on IPFS with a new CID.
On top of this permanence, Fleek enables composability by allowing users to set up private gateways to the traditional web and connect to custom domains.
FAQs
1. What role do pinning services play in data permanence?
Pinning services make dedicated nodes persistently store and replicate data on onchain storage networks like IPFS, ensuring long-term availability and preventing garbage collection.
2. What are the best practices for data backup and recovery in long-term storage solutions?
It is better to back up data across other storage protocols for optimal security. However, Fleek automates this — any data or content hosted using Fleek is backed up on Filecoin, by default — ensuring data security.
3. What are some real-world use cases for data permanence?
Data permanence can help build digital libraries, museums, and everything in between. From preserving cultural heritage to ensuring the perpetual transfer of scientific and other knowledge to coming generations, data permanence has a lot of use cases.