Google on hard drive failures

[Jay West]

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