On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 15:08, Patrick Dunford wrote: > >However, I'd consider hard disk to be the most durable & safe storage > >medium, see recent discussions about the long-term storage capabilities > >of CD, DVD etc. So every few years, read in your data, and write it out > >to something different :-) > > > CD-R etc media have finite lives - then so do hard disks (whether going > or not). There is no one recordable media that is superior to any other.
True, but with HDD at least you're likely to detect creeping death earlier (with fsck problems &c) and have a good chance of backing up and saving (most of) your data, whereas with offline storage ... well, generally things only fail when you need them ... :-) and then they fail catastrophically. Of course, that only works when only some of the drive is being used for data, so that you have a decent chance of a corruption getting something replaceable, like the OS, rather than your data. Or you could RAID mirror your storage, which has a very low chance of losing data due to media dropouts. But that won't help you against an accidental 'rm' command ... :-( -jim
