[TriLUG] Safest long-term media

Joseph Mack NA3T jmack at wm7d.net
Sun Jul 12 14:42:24 EDT 2009

On Sun, 12 Jul 2009, Christopher L Merrill wrote:

> Certainly true. But the OP requested _long_term_ storage.

My reply was that historically there's no such thing.

What did we have 10,20,50yrs ago that you can plug into your 
current hardware? For 10yrs it's only IDE (I threw away my 
scsi disks and tapes years ago). Beyond that - nothing.

If someone here were to come up with an answer, you'd need 
to how long they've been using (tested) it. Their answer 
would be no better than that length of time.

I suggested rolling backups to the current technology every 
5yrs. I have a pile of hard disks that I plug in every 3-6 
months to do updates. The disks get only a couple of hours 
of use a year. You can buy 1.5TBytes of disk for a couple of 
tanks of gas (run rw badblocks on any new disk or any disk 
that is being repurposed). The only files I've ever lost in 
the last 30yrs have been due to lack of organisation on my 
part (I didn't back them up, or I backed them up to 
somewhere I can't find - for whatever reason they're gone).

The disk backup is a scheme that I've only been using 
actively for 5yrs. I've been doing it without much thought 
or deliberation for about 25yrs (starting with piles of 


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