On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:01:06 -0400, Alan Browne
<alan.browne@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>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
FYI....
I recently decided to replace my CD backups, starting with the oldest
CD...
aprox. 1998... since they are at the 10 year mark...
I had about 100 to do, and it took me a few months of leisurely after-work
activity... I moved them to a HD and then burned them onto both CDs and
DVD's.
Of the 100 discs, I had 2 that had read errors. And only a few of the
files were
bad, not the whole disk. Pretty good results I'd say... because of my
multiple
backup philosophy, I didn't lose anything.
But the big problem?
Format!!
Lots of the discs were Direct CD, now called drag-and-drop, a form of
packet
writing... Most disks were closed, but a few were open, but that didn't
seem to
matter... these old format discs took 3.5 hours each to copy the files! I
know I
timed a few!!
These disks had from a few hundred to a few thousand files, depending on
type,
and you could watch the names slowly go by! 10,000 seconds IS a long time!
If you have packet discs I suggest you get started replacing them!
As for other storage problems, I have 3 bad HD's that were in my sock
drawer...
it seems that putting a HD aside doesn't do any good... someone recently
told me
they should be spun every month or so because the mech gets frozen... like
your
old bike from the 60s in the back of the garage!
Did you ever open a HD to see what makes it tick? Those little parts look
real
fragile!
Now I'm relying on massive DVD redundancy... every file on 3 or more
discs...
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