On 24-03-2010 15:33, Scott Courtney wrote: > On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 13:14 -0500, Josh Fisher wrote: > >>> Agreed. I would not expect a drive to be readable if you sit it on a >>> shelf for 10 years. It probably would not spin up unless you kept it >>> in a humidity protected environment. >>> >> All media fails in the long run. It is just a matter of how often you >> have to refresh the long term storage. >> > Magnetic domains deteriorate over time due to thermal agitation of the > molecules, stray magnetic fields, etc. The bearings in the drive are > probably okay for ten years or so in storage, but I would wonder whether > the lubricating fluids would be stable that long. Also, there is the > question of whether the drive interfaces will still be supportable in a > decade. If you had an old MFM or RLL drive from the 1980s or early 1990s > today, you'd play hell trying to find a controller. If you had a > controller, you'd play hell trying to find an ISA bus machine to plug it > into. > > Long-term archiving is a tough and complex problem, unfortunately. >
What is the best strategy and storage media for long-term backups, say to 10 or 20 years (if any)? I ask because I do have an old DLT tape drive and some tapes, unusable, because its SCSI controller is no longer among us. It is not 10 years old and is already a problem. -- Marcio Merlone ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
