I say write them out onto acid-free paper: should be good for at least 300
years without active management, if there is no fire. If that doesn't work, I
believe babylonian clay tablets have an even longer expected life time….
Dale, I must say I am impressed… I gave up after the exabyte to DAT transition,
and decided that if I really wanted to get data sets from (my) old projects, it
would be easier to regrow the crystals…
Adrian
On 13 Dec 2012, at 00:22, Dale Tronrud wrote:
> I don't believe there is a solution that does not involve active
> management. You can't write your data and pick up those media 25
> years later and expect to get your data back -- not without some
> heroic effort involving the construction of your own hardware.
>
> I have data from Brian Matthews' lab going back to the mid-1970's
> and those data started life on 7-track mag tapes. I've moved them
> from there to 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, to 9-track 6250 bpi tapes, to
> just about every density of Exabyte tape, to DVD, and most recently
> to external magnetic hard drives (each with USB, Firewire, and eSATA
> interfaces). The hard drives are about five years old and so far
> are holding up. Last time I checked I could still read the 10 year
> old DVD's. I'm having real trouble reading Exabyte tapes.
>
> Write your data to some medium that you expect to last for at least
> five years but anticipate that you will then have to move them to
> something else.
>
> Instead of spending time working on the 100 year solution you should
> spend your time annotating your data so that someone other than you
> can figure out what it is. Lack of annotation and editing is the
> biggest problem with old data.
>
> Dale Tronrud
>
> P.S. If someone needs the intensities for heavy atom derivatives of
> Thermolysin written in VENUS format, I'm your man.
>
>
>
> On 12/12/2012 1:57 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
>> Better option? Certainly not TAPE or electromechanical disk drive. CD's and
>> DVD's don't last nearly that long and James Holton has pointed out.
>>
>> I suppose there might be a "cloud" solution where you rely upon data just
>> floating around out there in cyberspace with a life of its own.
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> On Dec 12, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Good luck on your search in 100 years for a computer with a
>>> USB port. You will also need software that can read a FAT32
>>> file system.
>>>
>>> Dale "Glad I didn't buy a lot of disk drives with Firewire" Tronrud
>>>
>>> On 12/12/2012 1:02 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
>>>> SanDisk advertises a "Memory Vault" disk for archival storage of photos
>>>> that they claim will last 100 years.
>>>>
>>>> (note: they do have a scheme for estimating lifetime of the memory,
>>>> Arrhenius Equation ... interesting. Check it out:
>>>> www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/ and click the Chronolock tab.).
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone here looked into this or seen similar products?
>>>>
>>>> Richard Gillilan
>>>> MacCHESS
>>>>
