Mastodawn

Hey, weird tech #hardware question.

What is the best, most reliable, long term, but still easily accessible, non-cloud storage option for massive gigabytes of data?

Like, I have a xxx terabyte backup drive, but someone recently told me that those aren't reliable long term, unless consistently powered up, as bits can disappear, corrupting files. (It seemed crazy, but other posts seem to confirm it.)

So, if not xternal SSD, are lots and lots of cd/dvds still the most reliable storage media? Surely no?

#datastorage #backups #archives

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Matthew Skala

@MissConstrue Basically all forms of archival media need to be occasionally recopied, to last - a fact religious organizations have known for thousands of years already. It's just a question of what your timelines are.

Magnetic *tape* is not bad. With magnetic disk that isn't powered on, I'd be more concerned about catastrophic failure of the entire drive (turn it on after 20 years off, maybe it doesn't spin up) than "bit rot." RAID can help with that, but better if powered on.

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Matthew Skala Apr 23

@MissConstrue *Pressed* CDs and DVDs are critically different from *recorded* CDs and DVDs. The pressed ones are extremely curable, but can't be manufactured with one-off content.

And any kind of media, if keeping the data intact is critical, can be improved by recording redundant data (forward error correction) at creation time.