Technology

59534 readers

3196 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

470

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

153 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] tibi@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Hard drives offer the best price/capacity ratio, but they need to be powered periodically (at least once or twice per year). As with any other storage medium, include parity data and have multiple backups to avoid data loss.

Tape is too expensive.

Optical media can also be pretty good as long as you get discs made from inorganic materials and store them properly. M-disc is supposed to last like 100 years. The biggest problem is that they are on the path to obsolescence and optical drives may stop being manufactured. Also, it's a good idea to check on the condition of the discs periodically and redo any that shows signs of degradation (probably a good idea to replace non-M discs every 10 years regardless).

But regardless of the media, there is no archival method that doesn't require active maintenance, like periodically checking the data, ensuring you have multiple backups, refreshing any aged media.