William Graham wrote:
> Date: 2070
> Place: The attic of grandpa's old place, just before we put it on the
> market.
> Found in a box: A bunch of CD's with Grandpa's old pictures on
> them.......
> Found in a box: A bunch of grandpa's old slides.
>
> Which are more likely to be viewed and enjoyed by the grandkids? Will
the
> computers of 2070 even be able to accept the CD's of 2008?
Accept the CD's? Certainly. Why not? The survival of standards,
devices and the s/w to read them is growing, not fading. I can still
read late 80's 9 track tapes that I have stored. (But the data has
migrated else wise and more convenient to get at ...)
However, what is more likely is that the CD backups were
made with ordinary organic based CD or DVD's. These will go 5 - 10
years in benign (20'C or less, not humid) conditions. An uninsulated
attic will spend many months per year above 35'C or so... these disks
will be dead within a few years. The slides will be faded, perhaps, but
quite viewable. If you store the CD's in a very cool, dry place, they
might go 10 years or so.
To really archive reliably for decades you need to get the "metal" based
CD's and DVD's. They retail for a higher price, of course about $2 /
disk in spindles.
OTOH, the practice of migrating data on external drives has certainly
taken off. I just ordered a 1 TB drive; double the capacity of my
40% or so used 500 GB drive. We'll see how well "Time Machine" works.
The life of data on a hard disk is probably not much better than 5 - 10
years. Gotta move it around to preserve it.
For fire coverage, however, disk, CD/DVD or attic does not work well
(unless the CD/DVD's are stored off site).
Cheers,
Alan
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