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Large IDE Drives as Long-Term Archival Media?
"Backups are of no use without offsite archival copies so I plan to take one set of disks out of the pool, and archive them offsite on a quarterly basis.
However, I've heard horror stories about the data retention and usability off older disks which have been shelved for archival, for example disk stiction - where people try to restore data off of a 4 to 5 year old drive only to find that the disk won't spin up due to solidification of lubricants, or that they've experienced data degradation.
I'd be interested in the Slashdot crowd's opinion on using large IDE drives as an archival media. Clearly one possible problem is being able to get hold of a machine in the future with a suitable IDE interface to plug them into for restoration, but I can't see IDE disappearing within 5 years (maybe 10 though). I'm more interested in experiences and opinions on the suitability of the disks themselves for long-term archival.
- Is stiction still likely occur on newer makes of IDE drives or have manufacturers beaten the problems which caused this in the past?
- Likewise how likely is bit drop-out and general data degradation over say a 5 year and 10 year period, and what do people think would be the likely maximum feasible time that a shelved drive would be usable for?
- Any suggestions as to how would I need to store drives in order to minimize these types of problem and maximise their feasible life as archival media.
Print out all your data in hexadecimal and store it in a large vault. If and when a data loss occurs you just need to re-type all the data back in.
yes I'm being facetious
Trolling is a art,
Backing up to IDE hard drives.... That's a paddling
Not using SCSI like you should... That's a paddling
The right tool for the job is a tape drive, if you don't use it.... That's definitly a paddling.
Try backing up 80TB of data to DLT and Super DLT. You thought your stuff was slow. I have backup jobs that spin 16 SDLT tape drives and run for DAYS! And the solution to the ever rising cost of tapes? 21 hour tape rotation.... go team!!
This is proof that we need a +1, Troll moderation.
with all the stories I've seen about being unable to retrieve data from just 15 yrs ago (because the format is unreadable, not because the media deteriorated) I'm convinced that archiving data using a chisel and a rock is the best way to go.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Can I use my laser printer to print on Gummy Bears?
Can I dry my cat in the microwave?
Can I put rice in my car radiator?
Can I unplug all the fans in my computer so it will run quieter?
Can I run 120 VAC on the spare CAT5 pairs?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Get alot of archive quality, acid-free paper. Get a printer with alot of archive quality ink and print out the data in binary. Dots or slashes would work fine for the 1's and 0's.
Archive quality paper and ink lasts for hundreds of years. Should you lose the data on a magnetic or other storage medium, you could always run these papers through a scanner with some OCR and retrieve the data.
Sure, a fire or flood could damage these if you don't have them protected against that, but at least you won't have to worry about deteoriation of the medium.
-
Eh, I bounce DLT tapes off the floor on a regular basis, and just about all worked fine afterwards. The trick is to say, "It's still good, it's still good." before you pick it up.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical meadia having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration.
M
Yes. It's also a good way to pretend you're swamped with work. "This stack of paper in my inbox? It's actually Coldplay's latest single."
Seems to me that you should use the most modern solution out there. You want off-site storage and you want redundancy and you might like it to be distributed.
Sounds like P2P would be the ticket here. Just upload all your files onto Kazza and Gnutella and then let nature take its course, scattering them all over the internet.
Anybody see a problem with this? Seems like a "legal" use for P2P has finally shown up.
And just how many tons of paper are you going to need to reliably back up a terabyte in dots and dashes?
Assuming double the standard density (160 chars per line instead of 80, 132 lines per page instead of 66), which actually works out to quad density, you get 160x132=20120, say
- 20k per page
- 50 pages = 1 mb
- 50k pages = 1 gb
- 50m pages = 1tb
Now let's assume boxes of 5000 sheets. 10,000 boxes, at, say 20 pounds a box = 200,000 lbs, or 100 tons. Man, give me the toner franchise for this!"accidentally drop it and have it shatter"
Moses: I bring to you these fifteen [crash], ten, ten ommandments.
Stegnographize your data and hide it in an amateur pr0n video.
To restore from backup, search with Kazaa.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
As long as we are on that track, the Internet was designed to withstand nuclear attack, so its obviously the best choice: archive, encrypt and have others mirror your data.
I know, I know, how do you get these people to do it? And how much will it cost? Easy, and I can get them to do it for free.
Name the backup DIVX_The_Twin_Towers.avi and put it up on Gnutella or WinMX. Problem solved.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
> Their answer? A huge RAID array starting at 180TB and growing steadily over time.
Last time I looked, one Library of Congress was only 10TB, and I bought a 100G drive for $100.
So my rig sported a cool 0.02 LoC in my rig. I felt gr8. I mean, I 0wn3d.
Now you're telling me I only have 0.00055555 Libraries of Congress? I f33l s0 l4m3.
Bastards.
"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." - Linus Torvald
but the cheapest way to go is to get several 100,000 or so HD 1.44 floppies. just rotate them through every month or so to keep them fresh, and put those aol disks to good use.
The next best thing to rock and chisel.
In the early 90's we spent $1500 for a 3 gig drive that we used to back up our workstations. We then backed up that drive to tape. It was infinitely faster than screwing with tapes in the night.
Right now I am backing up 53 workstations to a hard drive file using Retrospect. I then copy the file to another server and backup that server. Somewhere, I will have a copy of those backups because it exists on two machines and a tape.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
For home use, pretty obvious - MP3z, DiVX movies, and TiVO shows. Re-downloading the MP3z and pr0n^H^H^H^HDiVX movies would suck because you'd have to find and re-download the missing files. Likewise, re-recording the TV shows on your PVR would be a pain because you'd have to wait for your cable company to air them again.
You'd keep the RAID array up at home, and that'd be your media box.
But you'd still need a couple of 120G drives down at the local bank in the event of a fire at home. Or better yet, at your Grandma's house 100 miles away, if you live in an earthquake-prone area.
And while I've mentioned the time cost of re-downloading, this risk really isn't about piracy - even if you own everything on your media server, you can't re-encode your CD or DVD collection if said collection has been transmogrified into a melted lump of goo or shards of polycarb.
Every time you visit Grandma, or once every six months, whichever is less frequent, you swap drives.
(Just remember to pack the drives securely when you drive to Grandma's. And drive carefully. RAID won't protect you if all the drives in the array go sailing through the window at 60 mph ;-)
duh - what am I saying? LucasFilm probably freezes their backups in carbonite. They should be perfectly preserved, if they survive the freezing process. ;-)
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
As disk space grows, so does your family/backup.
To see examples of how this works see: Mad Max - Thunderdome, The Bible, American Indians, The Fellowship of the Ring, Aesops Fables, and the Legend of How the Great Nog Vomited the Earth and Heavens in Ancient Times, Before the Oceans Drank Atlantis.
I have heard rumors that this is how Google archives.
Also, the obvious answer to the authors question is buy 900 trillion flip-flops and hook them up to the wall outlet with a old rusty pair of bronze wires, feed the flip-flops through 900 trillion lines coming from a decoded IDE output in realtime. Weeeeh! Or you could take a top suspended in a vacuum with magnets on the edges of it. And for every bit you want to encode on it, you have an electrical field deliver an impulse of (2^bit number)*(bit-value)*(whatever unit you want) to the top in the vacuum. Later when you want to decode it, just start at the largest bit number and provide an opposing impulse and if the direction of the top changes then return a 0 otherwise return a 1. Simple, infinite data storage, fairly easy implementation, all you need is something to monitor the speed and make corrections when necessary (or observe the amount of friction and have it do periodic adjustments). You see how easy this is?
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
...the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
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there's always the back of the paper
maybe you could write checksums on the backs
karma: ouch!
--Begin #! /bin/sh
mv $1 /dev/null
End--
Benefits:
1. No worrying about media
2. Saves space
Drawbacks:
1. May be difficult to get your data back
2. No GUI (yet)