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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

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[–] leisesprecher@feddit.org 20 points 1 month ago (28 children)

But what actually is "archival"?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone -3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Cloud storage? Store it on 2 different providers like B2 and iDrive or something, pretty low complexity.

[–] leisesprecher@feddit.org 15 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Is it? It's rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You'd have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That's not really low complexity.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 1 points 1 month ago

I've got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my "other backup" for Google photos so I don't mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That's about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it's probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

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