[Cialug] long term storage

[Colin Burnett]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Zachary Kotlarek<zach at kotlarek.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 15, 2009, at 7:35 AM, Colin Burnett wrote:
>
>> There is no such thing as archiving of digital data, which is rather
>> worrisome.
>
> I agree, insofar as you have to continue to care about your data to ensure
> it lives on. To a large degree that's not unique to digital data; while
> books have a longer shelf life they're just as likely to be
> lost/trashed/allowed to decay/etc. unless they're considered important by
> their keeper

Both require appropriate storing conditions, that's a given I think.
That being equal there is no archiving of digital data.  I can put a
book on a shelf and still read it in 200 years (granted it's data
density is rather small).  Can you make that assertion about any
existing data storage technology and (the kicker) maintain a
reasonable data density?  I could do punch cards but that's totally
impractical for, say, 100 TB.  Glass-pressed DVD's might last that
long but who's going to get glass-pressed masters made for some 20,000
DVDs that are one-offs?  20,000 DVDs is also rather impractical.

That's what I mean by "archiving of digital data".

Then there's the whole issue of software RAID under LVM and write
barriers if you go the hard drive route (I haven't heard if they've
fixed that yet) which makes making large volumes very, very unwise.


Colin