Solid state drives are only rated for 1 year of data retention without power. Hard drives can retain data for decades, but there’s a good chance they will not spin up after sitting for years.
Optical is the only affordable option for long term, offline backups. Tape is too expensive for consumer use unless you have a huge amount of data to backup.
ive got early ssds ive refreshed that are a decade old. drives i boot and refresh every 6-12 months. ive not had any data integrity issues. but im only dealin with ~40tb of data. ymmv
ive had a shitload of optical disks fail with no where near the storage i need
Mileage varies, but the point stands - are there any manufacturers looking out for us, or are shareholders going to squeeze us out of every drop of ownership we’ve got?
M-DISC or BD-R. Need a blu-ray burner. M-DISC is supposedly the most resilient. Playback works in pretty much any blu-ray player to read as data or as video file if mastered that way. Problem is M-DISC and BD-R are maximum 100GB. You can get BD-R at 128GB but you have to order from Japan. Make sure BD-R are HTL instead of LTH. LTH are more likely to degrade because they use an organic dye layer for recording, whereas M-Disc and BD-R HTL use a hard layer that aren’t as sensitive to temperature, humidity, and sunlight.
M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.
That does sound to me like it can probably hold up for archival purposes.
I suppose that unless and until data density stops increasing, we can’t have a lot of real-world data about actual survival – we can only simulate it by increasing what we believe to be the critical stress factors. Increase light intensity at various frequencies, increase humidity, increase heat. If something’s really critical, might be a good idea to use multiple archival media formats; if we are wrong about one but right about another, then at least we’ve the backup.
Solid state drives are only rated for 1 year of data retention without power. Hard drives can retain data for decades, but there’s a good chance they will not spin up after sitting for years.
Optical is the only affordable option for long term, offline backups. Tape is too expensive for consumer use unless you have a huge amount of data to backup.
k
ive got early ssds ive refreshed that are a decade old. drives i boot and refresh every 6-12 months. ive not had any data integrity issues. but im only dealin with ~40tb of data. ymmv
ive had a shitload of optical disks fail with no where near the storage i need
Mileage varies, but the point stands - are there any manufacturers looking out for us, or are shareholders going to squeeze us out of every drop of ownership we’ve got?
I don’t really do archival stuff, but the people at /r/DataHoarder on Reddit do.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/mn8yn0/best_long_term_10_year_archival_medium/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
That does sound to me like it can probably hold up for archival purposes.
I suppose that unless and until data density stops increasing, we can’t have a lot of real-world data about actual survival – we can only simulate it by increasing what we believe to be the critical stress factors. Increase light intensity at various frequencies, increase humidity, increase heat. If something’s really critical, might be a good idea to use multiple archival media formats; if we are wrong about one but right about another, then at least we’ve the backup.