Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
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.
Most don't last long.
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Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html
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.
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 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...
