Tapes and close to a quarter-century.

[Tom Buskey]

On 9/21/06, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> > now and then.  Magnetic media will fade over time due to the earth's
> > magnetic field.
> Actually, while CDs and DVDs are better than magnetic media, they do fail
> after a while. There was a recent study that mentioned that.


Photgraphy sites have looked into this a bit.  CDs seem to last longer.
DVDs have the recording substrate in the middle instead of on the top.  The
laquer must seal the layers to prevent oxidation of the substrate.  There's
also a bacteria that can eat the substrate.

Tere are archival "100 year" CDs and DVDs you can buy.  Made with gold (no
oxidation) and an extra scratch resistant coating.  They're made with much
more care then the store brand discs.


> I remember thinking 1.2MB floppies will be around for a long time.  Try
> > buying a laptop or PC with any kind of floppy now!
> True. if you want a floppy today, you probably need to get an external
> USB.
> Additionally, most systems are going to SATA drives today rather than the
> IDE drives we are used to.


Sure.  Lots of people use external USB  for backups.  They're fragile and
I've had drives in the past that wouldn't spin up after they were
shutdown....

> Tape seems to stick around a bit, but capacities keep
> > going up and prices stay the same (~ $1k for a 4mm drive).  CDs have to
> > potential to be around for a long time.  Eventually they'll be replaced,
> > but I imagine it'll be more then 10 years before you can't buy a machine
> > that'll read them.
> The advantage of tape is that the price per byte is very low, and a very
> large amount of data can be stored. The advantage here is for commercial


Lots of companies are going disk based backups w/ tapes for offsite too.
But that's not archiving.


backup purposes where businesses store a lot of their data offsite, and
> after Katrina, we learned that local offsite storage facilities are not
> enough. I worked for a bank DP center in Miami, and we had a tape vault
> building on the other side of the parking lot. Today, they probably have a
> duplicate set of tapes in Atlanta.
>
> I suspect that the optical technology we are now using for CDs will
> continue
> to morph into the new HD DVD technology using similar media, but it is
> very
> possible that the drives may not be able to read the older CDs. But, we
> are
> also seeing the cost of solid-state memory coming down. How many of us
> carry thumb drives on our keychains. Right now a data DVD can hold about
> 8GB the flash drives are up to at least 4GB (but at a significantly higher
> price per byte). Solid state storage is kind of the holy grail of media,
> but given the speed at which the technology is moving, it could possibly
> replace CDs and DVDs as storage devices.



The holy grail ;-)
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