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If your only digital archives are on cold media (e.g. optical disks, tape, offline HDDs) and are never replaced you have a problem. Keep them on readable hot st

If your only digital archives are on cold media (e.g. optical disks, tape, offline HDDs) and are never replaced you have a problem. Keep them on readable hot storage that can be easily checked and upgraded over time and that should not be an issue. I've lost personal archives on CD-R/DVD-R myself and now I keep my archives stored hot on ZFS (has redundancy + bitrot protection), with additional hot and cold backups that are checked regularly. When disks fail they are quickly replaced, thus ensuring that the data is on relatively "new" as opposed to aging media. The article also mentions the problem with old/proprietary file formats for digital media which can't be opened in the future. Someone I knew actually had a story about how he had pictures stored in some obscure digital format (this was in the 90s when digital cameras were in their infancy) and he had to set up a equally old computer and software just to get the images reexported into something more modern. For something like this again regular checking of the archives (and keeping them hot) helps. Also I'm pretty sure the most basic standardized formats like BMP and JPG aren't going away for a long time.

Roark66 4y ago
It is interesting, could you say more on how old were CD-Rs that failed and what percentage roughly failed? Also how were they stored? I hear a lot of this information, but personally my experiences are diametrally opposite. I've never used cdrs to store really important data, I have all this on hdds, but about 30 20 year + old CDRs I recently found in my storage (stored in a dark cold - sometimes wet basement) are all fine. Same with hard drives that haven't been touched for the same amount of time.
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  The CD-Rs were around fifteen years old, stored in plastic boxes in my house (in rooms with HVAC). A couple of them failed in a set of twenty or thirty I think. I do have 20+ year old CD-Rs that still work fine though. For hard drives I have had ones that were mysteriously corrupted after being unused for six years or so, but others that were readable after fifteen. It partially is the luck of the draw.

Roark66 4y ago

It is interesting, could you say more on how old were CD-Rs that failed and what percentage roughly failed? Also how were they stored? I hear a lot of this information, but personally my experiences are diametrally opposite. I've never used cdrs to store really important data, I have all this on hdds, but about 30 20 year + old CDRs I recently found in my storage (stored in a dark cold - sometimes wet basement) are all fine. Same with hard drives that haven't been touched for the same amount of time.

digitallyfree 4y ago
The CD-Rs were around fifteen years old, stored in plastic boxes in my house (in rooms with HVAC). A couple of them failed in a set of twenty or thirty I think. I do have 20+ year old CD-Rs that still work fine though. For hard drives I have had ones that were mysteriously corrupted after being unused for six years or so, but others that were readable after fifteen. It partially is the luck of the draw.