hey it's that time again.
do you have data? that you like? is it backed up? do you have automatic backups you've checked are actually happening?
in multiple locations?
have you done a test restore to make sure the backups work?
*even an extra copy on a flash drive is better than no backups*
@gloriouscow It's still, what? Like plug it in every ten years or so for a few minutes?
I see a lot of fear mongering, but flash RAM doesn't degrade as quickly or as easily as people seem to think. It's not infinite by any means, but it really does take a lot longer to degrade than the claims going around much of the Internet.
Nothing is infinite. Magnetic drives lose magnetism over time and capacitors and such in each can degrade. Optical discs make claims of 100 years for good ones, 300 for super archive discs, but they need to be burned at a low speed in a high quality burner and stored very well. In 100+ years will they be able to read an optical disc though? (I mean, presumably whatever tech people have could adapt to it, but will people have it in their homes? Probably not.)
@nazokiyoubinbou @gloriouscow Mostly agreed, but simply powering an SSD doesn’t help for the majority of devices. They’re not refreshed like DRAM. Instead, SSDs made since roughly the advent of wear leveling store data with some error correction data. As blocks are read, the controller measures how much of the error correction capacity is used to clean them up. Above a certain threshold, the data is rewritten (probably to a different page, as decided by wear leveling).
*Some* SSDs have a sort of patrol scrub which reads the whole drive in the background over the span of a few days. Most don’t do this.
Nanoraptor
gloriouscow
Nazo
Zimmie