Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
meerkt wrote:I wouldn't mind at all to again have viable removable media. And if possible, with random rewritability, ok? Thanks.
just brew it! wrote:Burned CD/DVD/BD-ROMs are more of a question mark; however, I have an anecdotal data point for that as well. About 15 years ago I ripped my entire music collection (up to that point), encoded everything to MP3, and archived the raw WAV rips to DVD-ROM (disk space was a lot more expensive back then). About a year ago, I went back and reloaded all of the original rips, to create lossless FLAC versions of everything. Every single one of those DVD-ROMs (approximately 150 of them) was still readable. Now, I did take care to buy quality name-brand media, and the spindles of burned DVDs were stored in Ziploc bags. But aside from that I took no special precautions.
JBI wrote:Longevity of optical media depends a lot on the quality of the media and how it is stored. Yes, there were some early audio CDs that were manufactured incorrectly, where the aluminum layer corroded over time; however, I have been buying music CDs since the 1980s, and have yet to encounter one that has degraded to the point where it does not play. So anecdotally, they last at least 30 years.
Glorious wrote:I just digitalized a VHS from 1985, 32 years ago. The quality did not appear to be meaningfully degraded to my untrained eye, however, the lubrication on the tape itself clearly had some issues: I didn't have any overall obvious signal integrity issues (it even looked much better than I expected!), but I had semi-severe mechanical ones!
just brew it! wrote:I want the media to be passive, not something that can spontaneously cease to function.Get a hot swap bay or an external drive dock, and pretend that bare HDDs are removable media.
defaultluser wrote:There's now four distinct generations of optical
meerkt wrote:defaultluser wrote:There's now four distinct generations of optical
What's the 4th?
meerkt wrote:That's not a real generation in my eyes, no more than DVD-R DL or 80min CD-R.
meerkt wrote:That's not a real generation in my eyes, no more than DVD-R DL or 80min CD-R.
Vhalidictes wrote:meerkt wrote:That's not a real generation in my eyes, no more than DVD-R DL or 80min CD-R.
HD-DVD probably would count if anything used it - the physical format was different from DVD-9.
G8torbyte wrote:I read an article this morning about scientists warning of a digital dark age with current digital media at risk of disappearing over time. I always thought optical media would last longer than magnetic if taken care of and not scratched up but they say otherwise. They mention synthetic DNA technology could be a solution for the longer term and that “A single gram of DNA could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.”
meerkt wrote:just brew it! wrote:Get a hot swap bay or an external drive dock, and pretend that bare HDDs are removable media.
I want the media to be passive, not something that can spontaneously cease to function.
meerkt wrote:cphite: The potential problem here isn't a single person's backup strategy. It's the collective records of an era.
meerkt wrote:The potential problem here isn't a single person's backup strategy. It's the collective records of an era.
DPete27 wrote:meerkt wrote:The potential problem here isn't a single person's backup strategy. It's the collective records of an era.
Even if this doomsday situation pans out, I think we're still doing MUCH better than previous eras regarding data retention.
DPete27 wrote:All these articles assume paper is more durable than HDDs, and definitely more than flash. Paper doesn't need periodic copying to new media to stay readable.Even if this doomsday situation pans out, I think we're still doing MUCH better than previous eras regarding data retention.
meerkt wrote:Paper doesn't need periodic copying to new media to stay readable.