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

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Is it? It's rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You'd have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That's not really low complexity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Good backup software will just do that as part of its thing, like Restic for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And who does that?

I think you don't really get my point. I'm not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I'm arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah that's fair.

Common cloud storage such as google drive should be pretty resilient for the average person, data stored there is replicated in multiple data centers and verified with checksums, and it provides a trashcan and versioning in case of accidental deletion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I've got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my "other backup" for Google photos so I don't mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That's about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it's probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.