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

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (11 children)

That's why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you'd want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Archival grade m-discs, apparently. I had the same question. https://www.howtogeek.com/858426/whats-the-best-way-to-store-data-for-decades-or-centuries/

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=archival+mdisk

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

It's a shame their capacity lags so far behind current hard drives. And not many drives for these discs are still made, so what are the chances of them becoming unreadable just because no one has equipment to read them?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Cool! I can see how optical media could, in theory, be very long-lasting as long as you don't use materials that oxidize or otherwise degrade over time.

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