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

Re:Print!

[GeckoX]

Modded troll? What is with geeks so often lacking a sense of humor, thinking too much maybe?

That was (come on, spell it out with me) F...U...N...N...Y!

Sorry I have no points to mod that funny as it rightly should be.

disks

[zogger]

--couldn't you get just another dedicated computer for archiving and burn the data to a cd or dvd? Maybe a little slower but won't it last longer? the blanks are cheap, last a long time, when it comes to to re-archive I imagine the tech will be even cheaper and faster. Basically, I don't trust mechanical devices to last, wheras something like a cd should last for years.

Totally unrelated though, but I am wondering why someone doesn't make a modular hard drive where the platters themselves are removable semi-easily. If/when the mechanical parts of the drive crap out, you just place the platters into a new drive. Why isn't this done? I really don't know, not an engineer but it seems at least reasonable on the surface to ask.

Non-volatile: no such thing

[sterno]

well first of all, I've never seen any hard drive evaporate :). But beyond that technicality, there's no such thing as permanent storage. There are relative degrees of permanence and generally, the permanence is inversely proportional to the convenience. Storing a book on stone is pretty permanent, but it's a pain. Even still, the stone will slowly dissolve over time, and you could accidentally drop it and have it shatter.

You need to determine what is good enough for your needs. Will a hard drive last 5-10 years in storage and still retain data reliably? What about a DVD? What about paper? I have a computer running as my router, the drive in that dates back to my junior year of college making it roughly 7 years old. Still works fine.