Thanks for the explanation, Rick.
Yes, hard drives do fail eventually, probably sooner than the media on a
CD or DVD
becomes unreadable.
However, from my years of experience in IT, no backup system is
effective if the
recorded media are destroyed. This is the rationale for looking into
one of these
off-site means of storage; perhaps a cloud-based service. I don't know
much about
them at this point. I would not want to lose some 35+ GB of digital
photos and
music. Unfortunately, these services are not exactly cheap for that
volume of data.
Before I retired, I could have transferred everything to a
large-capacity USB or eSATA
hard drive and stored it at my office.
73 de Jim - AD6CW
On 12/31/2011 12:32 AM, Rick - DJ0IP / NJ0IP wrote:
> Jim,
>
> NOW TO DISK DRIVES.
> JIM, JIM, I ought to shake my finger at you for your comment on disks. ;-)
> "Not much has changed significantly since the first one?"
> Well you said price, but it has come down by about a factor of one billion
> (not exaggerating here) since the early days.
> The "Mean Time Between Failure" has gone from a few thousand hours to a
> million or even a few million hours.
> In fact it got so much better that the industry stopped using "MTBF" as a
> measurement.
> They now talk about the "Annualized Failure Rate" of drives, which is less
> than 1%; in fact now days, less than 3 out of every 1000 disk drives built
> will fail before they reach their design "end of life" age, WHICH IS STILL
> 5 YEARS, GENTLEMEN. 5 YEARS, NOT MORE! Don't be fooled by the MTBF spec!
>
> However you made up for that statement when you reminded everyone that
> magnetic optical (CD or DVD) does NOT live for 25 years, like they
> originally said it would! DO NOT BUY CHEAP CDs or DVDs FOR ARCHIVING. Even
> the good ones may fail after a few years. It's rare, but they do sometimes
> fail. If you want to keep your data very safe, make two archive copies of
> it, to CD or DVD, and use media from two different brands. If you do that,
> you have a 99% chance you will not lose your data before it comes time to
> migrate it to a newer media.
>
> 73
> Rick
>
_______________________________________________
TenTec mailing list
TenTec@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/tentec
|