91–100 of 204 posts
What would one use as a media for long-long-term storage, taking only into account the resisiliance of the ability to read the data from it? For example if you wanted to store data in a time capsule for like 100 or 200 and you where ganrateed the people on the other side had a reader capable of reading whatever media, and whatever format you chose.
"With appropriate, difficult to maintain, storage conditions, this film has a life expectancy of ~500 years."
“Handing someone a demo CD is like saying to them, Hey, you throw this away.” (Can’t recall the comedian, could be Dimitri Martin) It’s funny but burned CDs are a great handout for me. I can see through DistroKid that some people loaded them into iTunes and I got a small match but if money for it. Considering how cheap they are and “put in walk away repeat” the process is, I’m still happy to crank them out now and ag…
It was Mitch Hedberg joking about getting a receipt for buying a doughnut.
The doughnut joke is a different one I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5pjBmNyrE
Also, for someone who died going on 2 decades ago, he's really got some staying power; I see kids discovering him and liking him to this day.
Totally anecdotal but just a month ago I opened a box from my last moving (ended 4 years ago...) and I found a CD-RW labeled "Backup 2001", which survived 5-6 relocations, even an international one. Well, I put it into an USB DVD player I have aaaand, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and nothing shows up in Nautilus. Looking at dmesg I see a few I/O errors on the device. Then, I try ddrescue [1], start e…
Even with ddrescue you might lose a few bits. You will only find out when accessing those specific files and bits. For my photo history I prefer to keep PAR files next to it. On a running mechanical disc I haven't seen issues when running the repair. I do expect to see some errors in the future and as long as it stays under a certain percentage, things will be fixable. I started doing this long time in the past, when…
I used to be concerned about optical media longevity. I bought Taiyo-Yuden discs. I checked their integrity. I stored them carefully. But the format became obsolete (for me) long before the media degraded. Recordable discs are just too small for the backup use case I had. Optical drives are still available of course, but they are now rarely standard with a new PC or laptop, and soon will become specialist components,…
IMO, the #1 use case for optical drives is probably playing music in the car. For anything old enough that it doesn't have an aux port, it's the best solution.
* Tape adapters add a lot of noise. Maybe different drives work better than what I've got, but I tried and it's totally unworkable
* Short range FM adapters are terrible. Similar noise to tape adapters and the quality is really prone to degradation depending on the EM environment.
The stock of older, working cars is quite large. Eventually it'll get used up (outside of enthusiasts), but that'll probably take a few decades longer.
And as long as people are listening to CDs in their cars, there'll be a demand for the ability to burn them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you plan on digging a hole in the forest, every type of storage is going to cost some type of upkeep.
But keeping a box of storage media in your closet doesn't cost you anything extra, as opposed to cloud storage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with cloud storage is that it's a needy thing. You have to pay for it in periodic payments the whole time it exists. And it's also controlled by someone else. I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hi…
I concur, there is no "fire and forget" solution comparable to what a physical medium gives you. And I could have probably avoided the CD-RW corruption by dumping the whole image on a new CD / DVD / USB storage every now and then. I also have some external magnetic HDD that is now already ~10 years old, stored in the same conditions as the aforementioned CD, let see how it fares in 2032 :)
I've stopped using burned CDs and DVDs like 15 years ago, long before they were considered obsolete, after losing a huge amount of data, including multiple backups of projects. All of them were kept in their own case on a wall CD/DVD holder, no weights, no humidity, no excessive heat or any sun exposition. After only about 5 years like 30% of them were unreadable at all and others developed errors, so as soon as I re…
I've stopped using burned CDs and DVDs like 15 years ago, long before they were considered obsolete, after losing a huge amount of data, including multiple backups of projects. All of them were kept in their own case on a wall CD/DVD holder, no weights, no humidity, no excessive heat or any sun exposition. After only about 5 years like 30% of them were unreadable at all and others developed errors, so as soon as I re…
"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.