Hexxie wrote....
1) Long time users can get away with some OT threads
while newcomers like
me
cannot
This is generally not true, a few long time users who have been chastised by
me would beg to disagree with you ;)
2) This thread is about the preservation of data for
long periods of time
which can if you think about it be related to the preservation of vintage
data thus making this thread on topic
Not sure I understand what you're saying.
Long story short, there are some
professional and some hobbyist media preservationists here. The reliability
of storage media is quite important to them (and to those of us that hope
those bits of data are around 20 years from now). The whole topic was
brought up with regards to how to keep critical vintage system data (like
boot disks, etc.) around.
3) When many members on this list find a OT thread to
contain useful and
not
widely available information it is accepted even though it's OT
That depends on
how far off-topic it is. I have the rather dubious task of
making that distinction.
I'm constantly looking for long backup solutions
for which
currently consist of backing up on one-two HD's depending on the size of
the
file(s) and cd-r's which seems to me like the best current solution since
HD's don't last that long unfortunately...but even cd-rs don't last
forever..
I believe the generally accepted shelf-life of CDR media is somewhere
around
5-7 years, depending on how well handled/stored. CDR's thus fail to be
worthy of consideration when talking about media preservation. I believe I
am correct that generally accepted practice for preservation is having a
policy in place to rotate media every X years, where X is substantially less
than the projected media life.
Jay