17 Jan
2023
17 Jan
'23
2:54 p.m.
On Jan 16, 2023, at 9:48 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Not SSD, that's for sure. The fact those are becoming the predominant storage medium
is a bit of a concern for long term storage, because SSD is entirely unfit for that job.
Apparently they are ok when powered because the firmware will refresh the bits from time
to time, but you can't put an SSD on the shelf and still expect its data to be good a
decade later, as you can with hard drives.
With hard drives you have to worry about mechanical faults, of course. I wonder if there
are any long term storage issues with the bearings.
Most likely, the biggest issue with old storage devices is the loss of the device to
connect them to, and/or the loss of the code that reads them. To pick one example, I have
an 1990s era Dell laptop that no longer passes POST (it gives a "beep code"
failure that I haven't been able to cure). I would like to get whatever is on its
hard disk, but that has a proprietary interface as far as I can tell and I have nothing to
plug it into.
I have an RM03 pack somewhere. There probably are a few places left that could read it.
If it were an RA60 pack it would be a whole lot more problematic, I suspect. Without an
old drive, how would you recover the data? Spin table? Perhaps, if you can find, or
reverse engineer, the format.
The Long Now foundation has done work on the question of storing data in a way that can
still be deciphered a millennium from now. It's not a simple question. Some SF
writers have wrapped stories around the question (James P. Hogan did it several times --
Echoes of an Alien Sky, Inherit the Stars, and much earlier (1957) there was H. Beam Piper
"Omnilingual").
Early storage devices are less problematic than newer ones, given the more and more
complex coding used. Never mind intentional encryption; just the high density codes with
interleaving and ECC and all that would be somewhat akin to encryption when examined with
a future archeologist. Imagine, for example, an archeologist 5 centures from now trying
to make sense out of a box full of SATA interface hard drives, full of documents in PDF,
JPG, or MP4 format.
paul
What about M-DISC DVDs and BluRays? Archival
grade, not susceptible
to magnetism or EMP. I think BluRay discs are made of a
harder material than DVDs and don’t scratch as easily.
On Tue, 17 Jan 2023, Chris via cctalk wrote:
Don't know, don't care. If we're
being attacked by nuclear bombs of any stripe, I have far more humongous things to worry
about then what's on my hard drives. I suppose if you were wring a book and wanted to
back that up to an optical disk, go for it.
I care, and would like to know more.
Even without nuclear bombs, which I stopped worrying about 60 years ago, I have
occasionally had to deal with damaged data, from causes much more mundane than EMPs.
I have had magnetic, AND optical media that have "gone bad".
I am interested in whatever media are more likely to still be readable in a few decades.