I’m curious what kind of equipment others use for archival stoarge. In the past I’ve used optical drives, but find even “archival grade” CDs and DVDs may start generating errors after 10 years, let alone the cheaper disks. Some SMB oriented sites recommend tape, which I’ve used in the past (CD-type serpentine drives), but current tape systems generally cost over $5k and tapes can run near $100 each so probably overkill for the kinds of things I need to store (software source code, tax records, etc.) Admittedly a lot cheaper than a vacuum-column 9-track drive but still a substantial chunk of budget.
For short-term backup I’m using hard drives with more or less annual offsite storage to a safe-depost box of a drive with my more important files, but it’s getting hard to actually get safe-deposit boxes these days (my local branch closed, and the next closest site is about 25 miles further and world require me to change banking arrangements!). Of course, hard drives are not great for long-term storage as they are susceptible to mechanical failures and stiction after several years, particularly when inactive.
What does everyone else do for long-term (let’s say 20+ years) storage (if anything)?
As you wrote, ever since tape became prohibitively expensive, there hasn’t been a good option.
HDDs and SSDs may work, but there are serious concerns, including:
Mechanical devices (like HDDs) can fail catastrophically if they are dropped.
Either can fail over time if not properly stored (think temperature, humidity and ESD)
SSDs can lose data if unpowered for extended periods of time.
Stiction shouldn’t be an issue with modern HDDs. The problem was pretty much solved in the 90’s using a combination of hardware that physically removes the heads from the media when parked, and a power-on sequence that will drive the spindle motor extra-hard if any stiction is detected (an electronic version of you shaking the drive). But the other issues related to long-term storage still apply.
It seems that people today are suggesting you use HDD/SSD backup, but that you make a point of periodically powering-on and verifying your archives. I’m not sure what they think you should do to recover from discovered data loss, other than by making even more copies of the archive.
Recordable optical media is also known to be flaky over time. If you want to use that for archives, M-DISC seems to be your best bet. Not all disc burners can write to M-DISC, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find a compatible USB drive.
Depending on your specific requirements, you might take a look at using cloud services for archiving data. Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon (AWS Glacier) offer highly discounted cloud storage for long-term storage of infrequently accessed data, though using them directly, especially the initial setup, can be a little challenging for non-technical users. I haven’t looked into personal solutions from other providers, but I’m sure there are options, often built on either Azure or Amazon.
M-Disc is a nice thought. I didn’t realize there were 100GB discs now too. Back when I first looked at them years ago, I think the max was DVD size (4.7GB)…
Interesting, though I’m not sure I’m willing to trust long term storage to the cloud, though. Cloud does make sense for offsite backup though if one has appropriate encryption available.
I’m using M-Disc BD-R 50 GB discs for quarterly archives of specific document directories I want access to. (This is in addition to weekly backups of my ~ directory, and quarterly whole-drive backups).
I’ve used Verbatim discs, and I’ve gotten my M-DISC burner drives from OWC (Other World Computing) for the last 10 years. I’ve found the drives tend to last about 4-5 years, and then the write capabilities give out, and the verification pass after burning shows errors.
So far, I’ve encountered no corrupted M-DISC BD-Rs; but I’ve only got a 10 year window onto the process, which won’t help you if you want an optical disc lifetime of many decades.
I hedge some of my concerns here with the quarterly backups – the idea being that many (if not most) of the documents I’m archiving stay the same between 2-3 quarterly archive discs. So hopefully one of the discs with the file I want (in the state I want) will survive intact.
Thanks! I’m becoming more convinced that M-DISC is the way to go these days. As you note, even if the burner dies after some relatively few years, the important thing is the data. And yes, redundancy is a good idea too!