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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helplessduck Apr 23

@MissConstrue

I don't know if optical media is the best choice, either. Bit rot on CD's and DVD's is annoying as sin. Most of the CD's I collected in high school are now fancy looking coasters that I'll probably never be able to bear throwing away.

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MissConstrue Apr 23

@helplessduck

Oh no! Really? I have thousands and thousands of CDs I've never burned to another media. OMG, some of them can't be replaced, it's stuff from the soundboards at clubs where I had friends who were sound engineers. Oh man, ok, next week I'll burn those to hard media so at least hopefully there still exists a copy.

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KanaMauna

@MissConstrue @helplessduck

I spent several weeks last summer ripping hundreds of CDs. About half were 30-40 year-old commercially produced CDs and I had virtually no issues with them. More problematic were homemade burns, but 90% were just fine. The worst were those magazine CDs from the early 2000s. At least a 1/3 were unreadable.