Mastodawn

vince Jan 3, 2023

PSA: take some time in 2023 to back up your/your family's CD-Rs (and other recordable media) full of memories you threw into storage 10+ years ago; there's a decent chance they've started to rot!

the tenuously thin layer of dyes/adhesives holding the data *will* break down over time, rapidly so if their environment is uncontrolled, the surface was previously nicked/contaminated, or they were cheap ones to begin with

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Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲Jan 4, 2023

@0x56 Did this recently. My DVD-R backups held up about 80 percent, DVD+R also 80 percent, DVD-RW only 40 percent.

CD-R 98 percent, CD-RW about 60 percent. The ones from the 1990s held up better than any past 2000. Surprisingly to me, the "Maxell" CD brand was the only one that didn't lose any data.

I'm using SSD hard drives now, but a little wary of how long even they will last. Losing one disk isn't much, but a 2 terabyte hard drive has a lot.

@cainmark @0x56 yeahhh we've heard SSDs lose data over time (...silent bitrot, not just all at once!) if you leave them unplugged for long periods of time. Spinning disks are safer.

I really hope spinning disks don't go "out of fashion" because that's kinda important for long-term archival.

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author_is_ShrikeTron🔠💉x5 Jan 5, 2023

@frostwolf @cainmark @0x56 NAS level HDDs are now my go-to for archival (not SSD, not tape).

Then btrfs (or zfs) filesystem that has checksumming and error-correction, before the hardware-level ones.

With bigger TB drives coming out every year, rotate out the NAS drive(s) before the warranty goes (3 to 5 years).

Of course still mirror and off-site (cloud) backup the NAS.