[One prerequisite for this idea would be that the world knows how to perform time travel.]

First, you put the means of time travel in a standard CD-ROM drive. Then, burn a CD. Use time technology to place different information on the CD at different times. Finally, you write on the most recent 'revision' of the disk an index file saying at what time certain data is stored.

When you place this CD into a time-enabled CD-rom drive, it reads the index and remembers where the data is stored. When you request certain data, the drive obtains the data from the appropriate time.

Disadvantages: It's not practical to use this as a hard disk or anything written to often, since updating an index file everytime you change stuff on your hard disk isn't going to be efficient. The other disadvantage is you can't write data to the disk in the past, because the disk didn't exist then. So you have to write it in the future, which means you won't be able to use the disk until the time has passed when the index was written (the index is seen on the disk in the present forever after the index was written. Otherwise, the drive would not know where to look for the index.)

Assuming you go up in seconds, though, the downtime for a disk would only be a few seconds. (That is, Part 1 on Jan 5 2004 5:15:05AM, and Part 2 on Jan 5 2004 5:15:06AM.)
-- Snuffkin, Sep 03 2004

//One prerequisite for this idea would be that the world knows how to perform time travel.//

Yes, you are correct. Magic.

Welcome to the half bakery of Yesteryear or is that...
-- skinflaps, Sep 03 2004


1: Invent time travel machine
2: Document method on durable media readable by old technology
3: Send documents back in time

Hardly an original idea. Besides, [marked-for-deletion] Time travel magic. When you figure out how to travel backwards through time, come back and tell us.
-- Freefall, Sep 03 2004


Maybe Snuffkin just did, and is being circumspect.
-- Alan_Sosprach, Sep 03 2004


I am not sure why you need to use time travel for this. I write stuff to a CD all the time, then sort stuff based on when it was written, and retrieve accordingly.
-- bungston, Sep 03 2004


If time travel existed, then there would be no need to backup data - you could just go back in time to when it was created to retrieve it. (Essentially: WTF are you on about?)
-- choaderboy, Sep 03 2004


Is this supposed to create a more storage space? If not, what is the point?
-- swamilad, Sep 03 2004


Does the Wayback machine suffice?
-- RayfordSteele, Sep 03 2004


Even disregarding the magic objection, I've read this three times and I can't make any sense out of it. Why do this?
-- krelnik, Sep 04 2004


It is an over-engineered way to propose a method of incremental writes to a CD, with an index that gets updated with each write.
-- Aristotle, Sep 04 2004


Are any of you actually reading this idea? Because I think you are all missing the point, especially [Freefall].

With this method (assuming time travel works) you can store a borderline infinite amount of data on a single CD-RW, by overwriting the data over and over, but remember exactly when the data you wanted did exist on the disc.

I get it, anyway.
-- 5th Earth, Sep 04 2004



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