On 08/27/2018 01:24 PM, Louis Kowolowski wrote:
Probably need to know the timeframe.
As I recall, optical media does degrade, but its measured in 10's or 100's of
years. Likely long after the format has been abandoned, making the longevity
not the real problem.
Flash degrades when its not regularly powered after a few years (<10).
Disk suffers from similar problems to optical. The longevity of the disk is
unlikely to be the problem, but the format of the media, and or interconnect
will likely be difficult to deal with 10+yrs out.
Tape will suffer from the physical problems. You can use something like tar to
handle the formatting. Even if we stop using tar, its not that difficult to
deconstruct the format, since its just a concatenation of files.
I'm not aware of anybody who is actively working on this kind of problem, nor
anybody who has a solution to it.
The best thing I've been able to offer people is:
archive on disk, every 5 yrs, ensure that all disks are a) readable, b) data is
verified. If there are issues with either computers being able to read the
formats, or physically connect, migrate the data to new devices and reset the
clock.
Could you get away with >5yrs? In some cases, probably. It does seem to be
fairly reasonable for a middle ground, giving time on either side of a
hardware/software change to allow migration before its difficult to find equipment.
Replacing them every five years or less is probably good, as long as
there's someone paying attention to them, which isn't guaranteed. but
these alternatives seem like the best ones.
Thanks.
--
Regards,
Dick Steffens
_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
