Gustin Johnson wrote: > > Still, a good way to be portable, but do not keep critical data on the > > "system" USB stick... > > Spinning platters are not reliable either :)
Arrrg :(, this is such an evil topic ;). That's the wicked thing with digital media. They aren't safe and if you have good luck and they are save enough, you can get troubles with needed hardware, to get access to the data. I have a lot of data on floppy disks and DAT tapes. It's still possible to get a disk drive for some floppy disk formates, but there aren't any cheap consumer DAT players any more. If someone has backup hard disks with P-ATA bus, he should backup these hard disks to SATA, because in some years there might be no mobos any more having a P-ATA bus. My mobo only has one P-ATA port and a adapter, PCI to P-ATA didn't work. If you have bad luck, the layers of analog tapes can separate, but I only know one case where this happened and I know a lot of high quality tapes that are older than I'm. Analog tapes have a loss in highs for audio and also a quality loss for video, but for professional tapes this is reasonable. For tapes there can be crosstalk because of the storage, that's why tapes should be stored spooled to the end, to avoid an negative echo (sound, before the sound starts). Records have a lot of disadvantages, but some are older than my parents and still fine. Analog media seems to be more reliable, but also here I have the problem, that I don't have any hardware to play my tapes and because I'm poor, I don't have the money to buy a new needle for my good turn table system (some years ago needles were cheaper), I have to use a bad audio technica system for my turntable, so the records I've got will be played without bass. I guess RAID systems or backups to 2 hard disks are "safe", DVDRAMs are save and big digital tapes are save. Small tapes like DATs can easyly be damaged by the mechanic of the hardware. USB sticks, cards, CDs and DVDs seems to be less reliable than anything else. I have a lot of CDs and DVDs that aren't fine any more, but even floppy disks seems to be still fine. I've got no experiences with USB sticks and cards, resp. sometimes the chip card from my health insurance didn't work. While some technical equipment becomes cheaper and better, e.g. homerecording consoles, we have a quality loss and especially a loss in durability for some other stuff, e.g. storage media for recordings. BUT I've got some relative old audio CDs (not self burned, but bought in a "record" shop) and those CDs seems to be more durable than self burned CDs. Digital often is a bad thing, DVB television can become a slide show, while analog television only loss quality, when the radio reception isn't optimized. ;) Ralf
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ 64studio-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.64studio.com/mailman/listinfo/64studio-users
