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Bit Rot Stalks Your Digital Keepsakes
axlrosen writes "The NYTimes has an article about the problems of digital archiving. How many of your digital memories will still be around 50 years from now, considering lost disks, incompatible formats, hard drive crashes, fading CD-Rs, etc.? Unfortunately Peter Briggs' solution won't work for most of us. The only real way to make sure that your grandkids get to see your digital photos is to make real photographic prints from them. (When I bought my Mom a digital camera I installed Picasa for her, and made sure she knows to order real prints of all the pictures she wants to survive through the ages...)"
Haven't we seen a dozen or so articles on Slashdot alone about CDR and other bitrot? Slow news day? Or is it because its an NYT article?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Half of my 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies and backup tapes didn't work anymore without 3 months of being recorded, with rather usual tub-shaped MTBF curve. Worse yet, 10% of the floppies failed within one week of being recorded. Given how well written archiving software was at the time, a single bad sector on a single disk of a 20-floppy archive set would typically mean loss of much or all of the data, with probability of it occuring within a week being roughly 100%.
And with huge 5MB harddrives (physically huge, that is) I had a lot of archive sets. I wonder if I could actually read any one of them now. Would have to find a working 3.5" drive, for one thing. I'm not even starting about 5.25".
Then, there is a slim chance the archiving software would actually run on a modern PC. And only then would I have the joy of finding out if any of the floppies read anymore. Now, those backup sets were made only some 10 years ago. CD shelf life is easily 15 years, and there probably will be some sort of 5" optical drive in common use that will still read CDs, so you could copy all your old discs to one new shiney one:-)