5 ms·

"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.

by yosito 4y ago

DocTomoe 4y ago
Sure - but with HDDs, you tend to just move all your stuff during each update cycle, because the new generation then tends to have a multiple of the capacity you've had before. CDs/DVDs/... feel very much more like a "long-term" storage solution, even when it isn't. Maybe it's because you can put them in shelves and forget about them, much like books?
- cm2187 4y ago
  Plus your backup probably requires dozens of CDs and DVDs, and perhaps they then fit on a handful of 4TB drives, and perhaps now they fit on a single 20TB drive. For me, my storage needs increase more or less linearly, but storage capacity increases exponentially, making every cycle easier, involving less drives.
xenadu02 4y ago
Like DNA or living organisms: digital data has to be kept "live" to truly be secure, replicating itself somewhat regularly. Attempts to store it statically are cost-prohibitive or fail at much higher rates than claimed. Worse if the technology is on a down-hill trend because manufacturers focusing on quality are the first to go out of business (higher expenses in a shrinking market). You can ask the Floppy King about that - near the end of 3.5" floppy manufacturing they saw astronomical rates of failure, 30-50%. Similarly the quality of CD-Rs definitely took a nose-dive. I'm fairly certain the tail end of "20+ year" CD-R/DVD-R discs won't last as long as claimed but YMMV.
- augusto-moura 4y ago
  I'm not sure about this being the reality forever. Ever now and then we find some very old scripts or other ancient artifacts containing data from times already forgotten (at least on "basic" human language). If you want something to live eternity just etch the bytes into a stone or print it in some age resistent material. Of course we can still hope on a easily writable medium that would be also very resistant to ageing. Given the right context I even think that information produced by humans can outlive earth itself[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
squarefoot 4y ago
This is also true. Having also lost data on two hard drives kept in a drawer for just over a couple years I can totally confirm that, however it was a isolated incident probably also due to some physical issues in the drives, although they weren't old and SMART would report them as 100% healthy. After those two years both drives were completely dead, not just unreadable; ultimately I could bring one to life again after removing and carefully cleaning the controller pcb; however it still required a complete reformat as the data was gone, while the second remained dead. Now I rotate them so that every few years I copy all data to new disks while keeping the old ones until the next rotation: half of my NAS drives become offline backup disks, the other half I use as spare backup disk (with aggressive spindown etc) in some PCs, so I have both live and offline backups. Data should be safe, hopefully:)
- 369548684892826 4y ago
  Wondering if you do any checking for bitrot? I mean, if some files on one of your disks became corrupt over time how would you know before it becomes too late to recover it from older backups?
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. I'm relying on ZFS mirrors which hopefully should be a bit better than the alternatives at bit rot protection, but admittedly if I was hit by corruption at that level that would catch me unprepared. I'm open to suggestions however.
    - 369548684892826 4y ago
      > I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. Same here, but my primary backup is also using ZFS mirrors. I have one cronjob that once a month runs 'zpool scrub mypool' to validate all checksums as a bitrot test, and then a day later another one to email me the results of 'zpool status'. If that email contains "state: ONLINE" then no issues were found. But I've pieced this together myself and would also be open to anyone's suggestions!
mrjin 4y ago
If you keep a domestic model running 24x7, you are probably right. But if you just do cold archive, my last check were after around 12 years, all drives spinned up normally without any issue. No noticeable data loss at all.
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  This is my experience as well. Out of simple anxiety, I transferred data from a few drives (spanning 2007 to 2015). If there were any issues, neither my file manager nor the SMART status reported any.
bluGill 4y ago
My hardrives are in a ZFS z2 array: I have already survived one total failure with no dat loss. I not protected against fire, but overall my data is safer than ever.

"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.

by yosito 4y ago

"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.

Sure - but with HDDs, you tend to just move all your stuff during each update cycle, because the new generation then tends to have a multiple of the capacity you've had before. CDs/DVDs/... feel very much more like a "long-term" storage solution, even when it isn't. Maybe it's because you can put them in shelves and forget about them, much like books?

cm2187 4y ago
Plus your backup probably requires dozens of CDs and DVDs, and perhaps they then fit on a handful of 4TB drives, and perhaps now they fit on a single 20TB drive. For me, my storage needs increase more or less linearly, but storage capacity increases exponentially, making every cycle easier, involving less drives.

xenadu02 4y ago

Like DNA or living organisms: digital data has to be kept "live" to truly be secure, replicating itself somewhat regularly. Attempts to store it statically are cost-prohibitive or fail at much higher rates than claimed. Worse if the technology is on a down-hill trend because manufacturers focusing on quality are the first to go out of business (higher expenses in a shrinking market). You can ask the Floppy King about that - near the end of 3.5" floppy manufacturing they saw astronomical rates of failure, 30-50%. Similarly the quality of CD-Rs definitely took a nose-dive. I'm fairly certain the tail end of "20+ year" CD-R/DVD-R discs won't last as long as claimed but YMMV.

augusto-moura 4y ago
I'm not sure about this being the reality forever. Ever now and then we find some very old scripts or other ancient artifacts containing data from times already forgotten (at least on "basic" human language). If you want something to live eternity just etch the bytes into a stone or print it in some age resistent material. Of course we can still hope on a easily writable medium that would be also very resistant to ageing. Given the right context I even think that information produced by humans can outlive earth itself[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

squarefoot 4y ago

This is also true. Having also lost data on two hard drives kept in a drawer for just over a couple years I can totally confirm that, however it was a isolated incident probably also due to some physical issues in the drives, although they weren't old and SMART would report them as 100% healthy. After those two years both drives were completely dead, not just unreadable; ultimately I could bring one to life again after removing and carefully cleaning the controller pcb; however it still required a complete reformat as the data was gone, while the second remained dead. Now I rotate them so that every few years I copy all data to new disks while keeping the old ones until the next rotation: half of my NAS drives become offline backup disks, the other half I use as spare backup disk (with aggressive spindown etc) in some PCs, so I have both live and offline backups. Data should be safe, hopefully:)

369548684892826 4y ago
Wondering if you do any checking for bitrot? I mean, if some files on one of your disks became corrupt over time how would you know before it becomes too late to recover it from older backups?
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. I'm relying on ZFS mirrors which hopefully should be a bit better than the alternatives at bit rot protection, but admittedly if I was hit by corruption at that level that would catch me unprepared. I'm open to suggestions however.
  - 369548684892826 4y ago
    > I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. Same here, but my primary backup is also using ZFS mirrors. I have one cronjob that once a month runs 'zpool scrub mypool' to validate all checksums as a bitrot test, and then a day later another one to email me the results of 'zpool status'. If that email contains "state: ONLINE" then no issues were found. But I've pieced this together myself and would also be open to anyone's suggestions!

mrjin 4y ago

If you keep a domestic model running 24x7, you are probably right. But if you just do cold archive, my last check were after around 12 years, all drives spinned up normally without any issue. No noticeable data loss at all.

lynndotpy 4y ago
This is my experience as well. Out of simple anxiety, I transferred data from a few drives (spanning 2007 to 2015). If there were any issues, neither my file manager nor the SMART status reported any.

bluGill 4y ago

My hardrives are in a ZFS z2 array: I have already survived one total failure with no dat loss. I not protected against fire, but overall my data is safer than ever.