zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

Vintage Computer Festival declared on Wednesday 18 May 2005 10:13 pm: I think that the best way to combat that problem is to keep a live archive on some sort of constantly-accessible (not off-line) medium, like spinning disks. You will, of course, want to keep multiple copies, potentially not all on-line. Keeping the data online helps with ensuring that the data is kept on accessible media - always copy the data off when you have to upgrade the medium to something new. Storage can change a lot in 100 years, but it's unlikely to change significantly enough at any one point to prevent you from copying the data to then-current media. Of course, make perodic backups/replicas of the data, and verify its integredy against the replicas/backups as well as using checksumming, such as md5 sums. There's my $0.02 on the topic. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org