Recent content by Doug Lassiter

I think the best answer is M-disks (for local preservation) PLUS the cloud (for distributed preservation), and maybe regular backup to a hard disk. With regard to backups, I am reminded that fast backups, as in "smart updates", while fast, are not in the best interest of archival security...

That's sensible, about using multiple USB media from different manufacturers, and rewriting every few years. Not as easy as M-disks, but takes up a lot less space. There are abundant cautions about NOT using USB memory for permanent storage because they degrade as you write on them. But in...

You understand that Laboratoire National de Métrologie et d’Essais study evaluated disk lifetimes at 90C. As in, 195F. Yes, when my house burns down for 250 hours, they might not be safe. And those Syylex disks are much more pricey. A few hundred dollars each a year or two ago. And yes, you...

Correct about the prediction for M-disks -- it's just a prediction, but the resiliency tests that have been done on them are extremely impressive. Let's say I'm looking at 100 MB for one archive. Happens to be personal, but data is data. Wouldn't matter if it was corporate, royalty, or...

Sorry, but M-disks are 100% guaranteed to last that long without being touched. But they are only 4.7GB each. HVDs? No, those are just optical disks, which have the same degradation problems as DVDs. Their only advantage is data density, not longetivity. Fire/flood/theft/obsolescence aren't...

I'm trying to resolve the best archival strategy for data. I'd like a strategy that will assure it's viability decades from now. Hardware obsolescence is NOT an issue. There will always be someone around who can read a floppy disk or digitize 8mm movies (just did that for 70 year old movies)...

Having the USB hub powered on all the time is useless? Why? It's consuming almost no power ... USB sticks don't get warm when they're plugged in. Maybe a few hundred mW. Power certainly doesn't affect the lifetime of the stick. This might be an issue if we're talking about battery lifetime on a...

Thank you USAFRet. Interesting. Not sure how a switched USB affects moving data to a different PC, and I'm not familiar with Lightroom. You have a machine that will boot to whatever bootable device is attached to it? Never heard of that. In my machines, they'll boot to wherever you tell them to...

That's a good perspective about the likelihood of plug and socket damage. But why does one need to disconnect a device from a USB port, whether with a switch or by unplugging it? I agree that if you don't need the capability, you don't need it. But who needs it? Why do you need to turn a device...

I'm buying a powered USB hub, and it appears that you can spend an extra dozen bucks or so and get one where all the ports are switched. I'm trying to understand why I would ever want to switch off a particular USB port. What purpose would that serve? How would that capability be advantageous...

Well, on thinking about it, I have to be suspicious about the Larry Jordan strategy. The implication is that copying hard disk data automatically "refreshes" the magnetic bits. This sounds a bit like total bunk. Can anybody here provide any insight? This is NOT about detecting bad sectors...

Here's a nice article. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/storage/hard-core-data-preservation-the-best-media-and-methods-for-archiving-your-data.html One strategy is disk refresh software, which reads and rewrites a disk. There is a free app for PCs called "Disk Fresh" that will do that...

That's what I was wondering. Old fashioned magnetic tapes are readable (with the right hardware) fifty or sixty years after they were written, but of course the bit density on those was a lot lower. Actually, now that I do a little research, I head that "bit rot" on magnetic disk medium can be...

OK, I'm not sure I got an answer. Clearly turning the drive on and off is not going to help the lifetime. But it's not going to be turned on and off a lot. Maybe once a month? So after 5 years, power gets cycled 60 times. You're saying that's a large number? Obviously this isn't my only...

I'm familiar with the lifetime of powered up hard disks. Mainly bearings and mechanical stuff, one can usually count on four or five years. But what's the lifetime of a rarely-powered-up hard disk? As in, one that I fire up every few months just to dump some archival material on? Presumably it's...