Archival storage

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SecurityFocussed

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Sep 19, 2024
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In SN 992, the issue with data loss was discussed in the context of Iron Mountain's work in the music industry and Steve's observations re. how often his own disks seem to fail in his RAID array.
Well, if we want genuine archival solutions, there are some which are appropriate in some cases, such as this one that I actually read about today in my newspaper 📰:

Human genome stored on ‘everlasting’ memory crystal

Human genome stored on ‘everlasting’ memory crystal
www.southampton.ac.uk www.southampton.ac.uk

Southampton University in the UK (my alma mater) has been developing this optical storage technology for many years.

Not saying it is suitable for domestic use!
 
Well, as Steve mentioned, there are two separate, but related issues. First there's the issue of media durability, and the need to keep verifying and potentiality moving to a new copy (rewrite or relocate.) The second issue is that you need to have the ability to read the backup when you need to restore it. As in the physical hardware and software needed to parse your backup back into usable data needs to still exist. An everlasting crystal sounds neat... but it probably needs a specialized laser reader or something, and special firmware to drive it, and who knows if that will be still work and be available in 100 years, let alone in 1000 or more.
 
I have some CD-ROMs from c. 2000 that have failed and are no longer readable and others of a similar age that are still fine. Obviously SpinRite can't work on CD-ROMs, but I wonder if a similar program could exist which could recover data from failed CD-ROMs. Fortunately, I was not depending on my discs that failed.
 
As far as existing technology which may be readable for a long time in the future -- I still have some punch cards which are good as new, but I'm all out of card readers :) . Aside from a few hanging chads, those could be readable for decades or centuries. Perhaps more useful would be some form of ROMs. I expect that the old masked ROMs are aging well, although they were relatively difficult to produce. Those might be practical for anything that you want to make and store many identical copies of. I like the idea of something that is designed to be written exactly once, like burned PROMs. I suspect those will be readable for a very long time. It would be great if somebody offered a write-once USB drive with a very long lifetime. Right now, the most practical way to preserve large amounts of data is to store it in a data center, where it is their job to ensure redundancy and replace failing hard drives.
 
What are your opinions on M-Disc? I was researching for a cost effective way of storing family photos/media. They claim 1000 years, but I would be fine with 100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

It's too new to prove out their claim and I'm not technical enough to know why it would or wouldn't work.
 
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