Large IDE Drives as Long-Term Archival Media?

PlatterMan asks: "The question of how to cope with backing up disk drives which are rapidly increasing in size, onto tape and other backup devices which aren't scaling in size as quickly isn't new to Slashdot. Neither is the use of single, raided, and removal disks as backup devices, this has been covered numerous times on Slashdot in e.g. here and here. One thing I haven't really seen discussed however is the feasibility of disk drives as medium to long-term archival media, say 5 to 10 years. Like many people I'm in the position of now having multiple machines with a combined data pool of about 220 Gig, and backing up these onto DDS or DLT tapes is slow and manual to do, and expensive in tape costs. So I'm looking to add a removal drive bay to my primary backup machine and pick up a bunch of large IDE drives, so that I can do regular disk to disk backups over 100 Meg Ethernet (and for my machines which are in cages, over the Net) pulling out and alternating the backup drives on a 3-way backup cycle."

"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.

Thanks!"

Comments

Troll?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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."

I was surprised to find this comment modded as Troll. It was obviously intended to be funny.

I'd moderate it as Overrated because it wasn't even funny enough to be used on Just Shoot me, but Troll was very inaccurate.

Re:Slashdot - the "Jackass" of tech support

[scumdamn]

That was awesome, but everything after the Gummy Bears was anti-climactic.