Tools for very redundant reliable storage of sensitive data

Question

I'm seeking for a software which could help me store my cryptographic keys reliably. I generally don't trust online storage for this purpose, so what left is physical storage devices which I could keep in secret and full physical control.

The problem is that common consumer external storage devices (like optical discs and USB flash drives) offer relatively large capacity (orders of magnitude more than needed for storing cryptokeys), but low reliability of storing individual bits. I'd like to boost reliability at the cost of storage volume, using some sort of redundancy. I've heard of redundant error-correcting codes such as Reed-Solomon codes or Hamming codes. Are there any software solutions which employ similar function? The specific requirement of efficient error-correcting redundancy of user-adjustable level (estimated 10⁴–10⁵% more space for redundancy codes than for the data) is mandatory.

Answer 1

Short answer: It is rather unnecessary.

Long answer:

Just use any USB flash drives. If you have problem with that, store that in MORE flash drives and keep them together or separated geographically while locked. When the data has been correctly written into a flash drive, and confirmed accordingly, it is exceedingly rare that it would be changed. Yes drives can fail - if you want redundancy, buy MORE of them. You can even use micro-SD cards shall your physical storage space is limited.

If you want to use something more built for the purpose of course you can use smart cards with smart card reader.

There are also archivers that allow parity recovery:

* Parchive
* SmartPAR
* QuickPAR

Google them for more details...