Add to the fact that paper seems to be far more resilient then say CD backups (which I've seen several CD's that I created around 97-98 which are now having problems reading certain sections) and Tape backups of today I wonder if they are truly as high grade as say the old TU78s of the past (I've had my share of readying nearly 1,500 tapes that had been stored in outside storage units for over 10 years - no protection from heat/cold, frost/humidity) Most of them - astoundingly - were still actually readable, however some - even with baking - separated from their transport, others did a major number on the tape heads with globs of sludge as they read, but still over all, the tapes even well past their prime and kept in unbearable conditions, still favored well. I would wonder if todays consumerized backup media would fare as well. While bulky - I have been printing out nearly 9 years worth of email correspondence relating to all of the Atari historical research I've been doing and sorting it out to keep on record, I nearly lost it all due to a sudden HD failure, but fortunately had a backup image on another disk, I don't trust digital based storage for archival purposes. Curt Al Kossow wrote:

Al Kossow wrote: Yes. I regularly ( == when I remember!) backup my email by throwing it all into a zip archive and then that gets written (along with other stuff) to CD, along with an MD5SUM file. I need to compress so that it all fits onto one CD; I wouldn't normally compress stuff that I'm archiving but since I spit it all to CD each month or so I'm hoping I won't ever lose it all (and some of it _is_ offsite). Not that anyone will ever care about my emails and letters ... I don't. But I _will_ when I come to read it. To be honest though I've never yet had a corrupt file read back from a CD. Either the CD was fine or only intact files could be read back (intact == the zip archive tested OK). The reason I always throw an MD5SUM file onto the CD is so that I can test it immediately on a different drive. I think almost all of my hadnful of early "dead" CDs were stillborn rather than cases of infant mortality. I don't know whether Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, or whatever takes off next) will be any more reliable than DVD (or CD) but at least I'll be able to consolidate all of my existing data onto a handful of disks, so having multiple copies of stuff in different places will be much less painful. Although I remember thinking much the same about CD-R ("650MB? Noone will ever need that much storage ...") My main worry is that there will be NO successor to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. If the entertainment industry decides to go for streamed content, then will the comuter industry be willing to fund the next generation format? What will we all do then? Antonio

In article &lt;p06240800c1ed1a003e5f(a)[192.168.1.199]&gt;9]>, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes: Yeah, much better to have a socialist data net where all my personal information will be under the control of the government. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: That's why you routinely transfer from old medium to new medium every 5-10 years. Just last night I dumped 7 CDROMs to .ISO images and stored all of them onto a single DVD-ROM; then made a 2nd copy and stored that somewhere else. In five to ten years, I'll transfer the DVD-ROM onto some new medium. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 11:46:37AM -0500, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: If you can't rely on their integrity then they're not backups, they're hopes. I am supremely confident in my backups' integrity, and I test them regularly to make sure of it. That's why I keep all my data on hard disk where practical - even the CDs and DVDs I buy get transferred to hard disk - so that they'll get transferred to some brand new shiny medium every few years. This also means that the data are protected against the medium being scratched and against my computer twenty years in the future not having a CDROM drive. So it'll all go *poof* in a fire. Merely sticking your data onto a spinning magnetic disk obviously ain't good enough. However, that plus rigourously sticking to good procedures *is* good enough. A much worse problem for archivists is that so much data is protected by passwords and encryption. No-one apart from me knows the password to decrypt my offsite backups, and I've not written it down anywhere. So if I die in a house fire, that data is GONE. -- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Wow, my first sigquoting! I feel so special now! -- Dan Sugalski