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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 months ago (38 children)

Yeah if you're looking for long term it needs to be archival media. Many people think the flash drive will hold it forever but they are potentially the most fickle.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (28 children)

But what actually is "archival"?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

[–] whocares314 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Probably M Disk as others have said for consumer use, but Microsoft is working on storing data in glass that could last for potentially 100,000 years +. Not that you’d ever likely have that in your home. Although, maybe by 2100 we will, who knows. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/

[–] blackfire 6 points 3 months ago

This is really the only way. Ironically not far off clay tabs just much much smaller.

[–] Angry_Autist 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Holographic storage is a fluff project, the resolution we'd need to match modern density is simply to narrow to be done optically. I mean it sounds fun but will never be practical

[–] whocares314 0 points 3 months ago

That’s just straight up factually incorrect. From the link:

As a storage technology, Silica offers volumetric data densities higher than current magnetic tapes (raw capacity upwards of 7TB in a square glass platter the size of a DVD), and using beam steering of the laser beam, we’re able to achieve system-level aggregate write throughputs comparable to current archival systems.

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