Okay, so here me out: the ultimate cold storage for someone like Iron Mountain. You'd have to understand that you'll need a minimum of 96 hours for retrieval time, and it's gonna be expensive to get that retrieval rocket there and back. Or, build a big dish and send the data via satellite signals.
You know what they say, 3-2-1 backup: three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept offsite to guard against common-cause data loss. Depending on the cause, off-site could be a difficult place to go!
1) At the moment, we can't even get living people off the international space station let alone land on the moon and take off from the same spot twice.
2) If a space based proof of concept was practical, why would we not store our hard drive on the ISS. It is looking for some excuse to remain in operation and we can already come and go from it on a semi-regular basis?
3) If there was a global catastrophe to the extent that only moon based archives remained, then how are we going to go get them? This crisis destroys all data archives but preserves our space program?
4) Once we did get the drive back, what exactly might we do with it considering all other forms of data storage were destroyed?
5) If the data on the drive was so valuable that we were willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance that after Armageddon we could still get it back... Then why would the Chinese not just wait for us to place the drive then go get it themselves? Surely you would never encrypt it as the key would be just as vulnerable to loss as the data.
This is absolute garbage. It's not even close to being true. Since the astronauts arrived on the Boeing craft, SpaceX has delivered and retrieved other astronauts. They are not still on the ISS because there's no ability to bring humans back, but because of a scheduling logistics situation.
Continuing to push this scheduling snafu as being unable is just nonsense, and you are as well for pushing it.
> 2) If a space based proof of concept was practical, why would we not store our hard drive on the ISS. It is looking for some excuse to remain in operation and we can already come and go from it on a semi-regular basis?
There's only so much space on the ISS. Also, it's being decommissioned soon, so unless some company wants to take it over as a business--which NASA is open to yet no takers--they've contracted SpaceX to de-orbit the station.
We can't even get people back from the ISS in 96 days.