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Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.
It is. Magnetic tape is still king.
how did these people not know that hard drives die??? CDs die. DVDs die. the only way to keep your data is to copy it periodically, and this has always been true.
ffs, fucking DNA survives because life keeps copying it all the time.
Optical discs like CDs and DVDs last a very long time if stored properly. It's using them that kills them fast. So in terms of data archival they're actually pretty good. Regardless, u right, make backups of backups and replace the media its stored on every once in a while.
Yeah I work for a place that uses discs for archival in addition to tapes and the discs do have specific requirements for storage, like opaque boxes in a temp and humidity controlled room. The discs are also some fancy Japanese brand I've never heard of. Probably best not to pickup a pack of CD-R at the walmart and use those.
i've had factory printed DVDs die while stored at room temperature in the dark (case). they just developed holes.
Pressed optical disks, yes. Dye-based writable and re-writable do not last very long at all.
Depending on the disc, they can last anywhere from 5 to over 100 years. The over 100 year ones are (were?) marketed as archival, and only CD-R. Do not trust any random writable disc to survive very long.
I tested some backup DVDs from 2012 a couple of months ago and they were completely unreadable.
The music industry and failing to understand technology, name a more iconic duo.
I have a crate of old hard drives going back to the late nineties. Am I the only person that migrates the data to new drives regularly? At this point it is a yearly tradition for me to pick up larger drives during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales. Why rely on old 4tb drives when you can move them all to fresh 14tb drives?
NAS is another option instead of relying on random assortment of drives.
But it's most cost-effective to use cold storage like Backblaze if you don't need to access that data and just want to archive it.
What I meant by drives are NAS. I buy the drives on sale spin up a new array, migrate the data, and redirect the mount point.
I use to cold store until I realized that unless I have access to it, it might as well not exist. Now I keep everything live, even backups going back to 1997.
The only data I have "lost" are copies of my old warez CDs from eastern Europe because I have no idea where I have stashed them, and a pack of Zip Disks because I have no functioning Zip Drive.
Phew, I was imagining a closet of drives. NAS is great.
Cold storage is always controversial as you are storing it on someone else's hardware, but it is by far the most cost-effective option. Just a single month's electricity cost in some places can match years of cold storage.
Using both of course is recommended, as cold storage acts as another backup vector in case your own storage ever gets catastrophic failure due to fire or flooding. 3-2-1 rule and all. But cost is always a factor in people using the best practices.
I’m the opposite: I migrated 2 4TB drives from my first NAS into the actual one. The drives are going strong and nearing ten years (!) of run time. Two out of eight drives died in this server since 2017. Both were newer. I’m not going to change a single disk before it dies. Most value for money in my opinion.
But I can afford this „risk“: My server has a redundancy of 2 disks. It has a local USB backup, is mirrored to two remote servers in different locations with local backups as well.
One reason why I love btrfs is the ability to add (and remove) arbitrarily sized drives to the disk array while maintaining multiple redundant copies of my files.
unRAID can do this with both xfs and btrfs.
30 year old hard drives failing?
Color me shocked
Drive failure in the 00s was really common. I lost 2 or 3 separate drives from different mfg over the course of a couple years. Newer drives are better but even in modern nas setups, I planned on losing at least 1 drive per year on a 4 drive nas even fresh out of the box.
Always keep data your care about in at least 3 places and in at least 2 different mediums with one preferably offsite. I like to have one drive in use, one backup that sync's daily, and one that I keep in cold storage unplugged. Then swap the sync drve and cold storage drive every so often.
So far over a span of maybe 40 years of computing I've only lost two HDDs. A number of 5 1/4 floppies back then but that was typical. Both drives I was able to pull most of the info off to a new drive, so yay for the mechanical drive, where a SSD you're left with either a miracle, or looking for the experts to retrieve something. I'm no power user, so perhaps that's part of the reason, but ever since we got into the giga and tera range of storage my first thought is always...wow, that's a lot to lose at one time.
I mean, don't we all; time erodes us all... that being said how do hard-drives decay, compared to other things like VHS tapes and DVDs?
the only thing that we can do to ensure the integrity of our data archives is to completely rewrite them to newer media with backups every three to five years.
Eh, okey... that's a solution...
