Wayne Harridge wrote:
>>Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>"Accelerated aging tests
>>show that MAM Gold can be used as a reliable storage media for more than
>>
>>300 years." Of course, none of us are likely to know if they are right
>>or not. :-) Not cheap compared to the mass market, but may be a
>>
>>
>As a physicist I would NEVER trust any extrapolation from a short test (maybe
>it was 3 years max ?) out to 300 years. Once again marketing triumphs over
>logic !
>
>
And when all those old family photos were made, nobody could know how
long they would last either. Still, many did and many didn't. Storage
had a lot to do with the difference, and I believe it still does with
optical media.
Anyway, if accelerated aging tests say 300 years and the most I can
imagine needing before decline of availability of hardware to read them
is 30 years, and probably less, it seems like a low risk bet. By then,
those of us still around will be concerned about the rate of drift of
atoms in atomic crystal matrix recording media, wondering whether our
giga-terrabytes of data will be safe. And I think accelerated aging
tests will tend to separate out those with the best chance of lasting,
however long that may be.
Apropos the whole issue of archival storage, I've heard a few folks here
say they are avoiding the whole optical media issue by keeping
everything backed up on HDs. So how long does a HD maintain a readable
magnetic bit? Especially with the very small domains now being used on
high capacity disks, isn't there a weakening of the field with time?
Well, there must be, according to the principle of entropy, but is it a
practical problem? I would think one would need to have a program go
through, read and rewrite all the data on some regular basis. Is track
drift still an issue, or has that been resolved? Back when, one needed
to read/rewrite occasionally to deal with that too. I think there are
all sorts of reasons why HDs would not be ideal archival repositories.
What say, Mr. Physicist?
Moose
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