Mayoff Posted March 26, 2009 Report Share Posted March 26, 2009 (edited) This story is a good read if you are still thinking about using optical drives for backup. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/GLceTqT0Rvs/theres-no-great-solution-to-data-rot I am much happier with a couple of Iomega portable hard disks. Edited March 26, 2009 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 26, 2009 Report Share Posted March 26, 2009 see also: NIST white paper - Stability Study of Recordable Optical Discs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davert Posted March 26, 2009 Report Share Posted March 26, 2009 Yes... so optical backups may fail after a few decades... so can hard drives, zip disks, etc. Any media can fail. The ideal is a multi-method backup plan, e.g. CrashPlan + infrequent DVD+RW + hard drive cloning. Retrospect Desktop is $60; so is CrashPlan. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
audiobob Posted March 27, 2009 Report Share Posted March 27, 2009 Yes, CD and DVD media have a shelf life. The dye will break down over time with temperature, humidity and exposure to light. But how does this compare to the failure rate of critical moving parts of a mechanical hard drive over time? Also ATA is now obsolete, and how long will it be before SATA is? When will flash be a viable option for long term storage? The key I suppose is multiple back up media but DVD/CD media has never failed me. Hard drives have. At this time I'm gun shy about trusting mechanical hard drives as a long term storage solution. That will probably have change over time though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 27, 2009 Report Share Posted March 27, 2009 See: Google Labs paper - Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davert Posted March 27, 2009 Report Share Posted March 27, 2009 You can keep throwing data at us, and reading material, but it all comes down to this: all media can fail. Even paper can burn. Multi-method, multi-location backups for key data is the solution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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