Comments on: How Long Does Backup Media Last?

By: james braselton

james braselton — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:29:19 +0000

HI THERE IF YOU ARE RIGHT 8,760 HOURS PER YEAR OUT OF 1.5 MILLION HOURS IS 171.23 YEARS OR 2 TIMES THE HUMMAN LIFE CYCLE

By: Bill Chmura

Bill Chmura — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:47:58 +0000

I agree with G Johansson regarding the size of a photo library and shooting in RAW. I consider myself in the enthusiast range (not shooting professionally), but my 2009Q2 archive is about 20GB or RAW photos. USB sticks may not cut it in those cases, and while I use Tape at work (IT professional), I don’t have an income from photography to justify a tape backup for home.

Monte above mentioned the SSD drive which is like a USB in that there is no moving parts. These are relatively new (compared to IDE) but are shipping as an option in servers and desktop systems. The only thing I wonder with these (and I stress I wonder, because I have not researched it) is that there is a lot more on board electronics than a USB that would make for a more complex system, and increase the failure rate. That being said, I would still say solid state over moving parts for long term storage. Side by side, sitting on a shelf (not powered) I would say the regular hard drive has a better chance of failing (arm locking into place, platters oxidizing, etc)…

That all being said, there are some breakthroughs into storage technology that aim at dramatically increasing the amount of data you can store in a given space… For now, I may do a few SSD drives and overlap by a year or two…

By: G Johansson

G Johansson — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:56:43 +0000

“You can most likely fit every digital photo you’ve ever taken on a 4GB stick. And that’s under $15 to acquire.”

Well, in todays rapid evoulution when it comes to digital fotography that assumption can be way of the mark. I myself have a 6 year image archive taken with standard compact digital cameras, nothing fancy about the cameras. This is at the moment just below 20GB in size. However, using a fancy SLR instead capturing in RAW can easily amount to gigabytes a month (if not a session).

By: greg

greg — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:42:55 +0000

i want to no what is the best affordable way of keeping data for a time capsule, if i buy a waterproof usb or some other way can some one please help me. this will be used just the one time and will never be used perhaps ever again…

By: Monte

Monte — Tue, 05 May 2009 10:08:42 +0000

Although I agree with you Rich, there is a media that you have left out but could be considered as a ‘USB Stick’ or flash memory – SSD – Solid State Drive.

The meantime between failure is over 1.5 Millon hours, now how many read/writes that is I haven’t done the math but a year is 8760 hours.

So if you want to use something faster than a tape or usb stick then SSD connected to a SATA or IDE interface maybe the best of all worlds. (Higher end -ie: more expensive – SSD’s have dual connections. SATA or IDE with USB).

As a System Admin I had to take care of a large number of servers that were backed up to tape every night. And we had to certify 1% of those tapes a day. Also because it was a bank the tapes were kept in off site storagae and again we had to certify 1% per month of any tapes over one year old. Tapes for the Banking community have to be kept for 15 years. And of those tapes that were sampled and cerified I nerver saw one failure.

Slow but persistant for sure.

By: Stanford Noel

Stanford Noel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:17:20 +0000

Well folks – silver halide black and white photographs 100 years old are still perfectly useable. More primitive images almost 150 years old are useable. Will any digital media be around in 100 years???

By: Jeff Puuri

Jeff Puuri — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:02:08 +0000

This is good info on the longevity of the various media. I may need to rethink my strategy. I have a couple of IDE Hard drives that I occasionally hook up as slaves to mass copy everything whenever I get into an organization mood. For daily backup I have started using the cloud through a service called Carbonite. $20 / year for unlimited storage. I recently lost my machine and data recovery was pretty straightforward onto the new one. I will still stick with my HDD (or some other media) backups though especially after reading Rich’s recent article about trusting everything to the cloud and what if the service being used to entrust my data decides to fold.

By: Hal

Hal — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:46:58 +0000

Yes, same here, many thanks for the really useful info.

Hal

By: Max Alter

Max Alter — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:04:52 +0000

Thanks for the information. A timely warning if ever there was one.

I use a mix of CHs / DVDs, external HDD (about 4 years old and already has to be coaxed into starting up) and a couple of USB sticks. It’s certainly time to revisite all the older CDs and think about a HDD replacement.

May you backup last a lifetime

Max