11 Mar
2011
11 Mar
'11
3 p.m.
From: Dennis Boone
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 2:25 PM
> I guess I was being too clever with that post.
What I trying to express
> was my dislike of magnetic tape and floppies. Both require the media to
> be in contact with the head to work. Magnetic and optical rigid disks do
> not.
I'm not arguing for hundreds of TB of tape, or
against using sata
drives, here, but:
If the wear of validating your media is killing your
media, you've got a
media refresh problem. You're supposed to be migrating the stuff
forward onto newer media every ~five or so years anyway, so that you
don't get bit rot, continue to have access to working drives, etc.
That is very good practice for ongoing maintenance of archives.
However, in a museum context, you may be dealing with media that are several
decades old before you ever laid hands on them. In that case, care must be
taken not to damage the medium with validation testing prior to capturing the
contents.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/