Hey Dale, you really should get your personal RAID with hot swappable discs, since you don't like Firewire, how about Thunderbolt and a Pegasus RAID with 6 bays ? If a drive fails you replace it with a new one.
By the way if anybody has a functional DAT4 tape drive, could I send you one to read out a tape with some data ? If so, then off list reply would be nice, thanks. Jürgen On Dec 12, 2012, at 5:22 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote: I don't believe there is a solution that does not involve active management. You can't write your data and pick up those media 25 years later and expect to get your data back -- not without some heroic effort involving the construction of your own hardware. I have data from Brian Matthews' lab going back to the mid-1970's and those data started life on 7-track mag tapes. I've moved them from there to 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, to 9-track 6250 bpi tapes, to just about every density of Exabyte tape, to DVD, and most recently to external magnetic hard drives (each with USB, Firewire, and eSATA interfaces). The hard drives are about five years old and so far are holding up. Last time I checked I could still read the 10 year old DVD's. I'm having real trouble reading Exabyte tapes. Write your data to some medium that you expect to last for at least five years but anticipate that you will then have to move them to something else. Instead of spending time working on the 100 year solution you should spend your time annotating your data so that someone other than you can figure out what it is. Lack of annotation and editing is the biggest problem with old data. Dale Tronrud P.S. If someone needs the intensities for heavy atom derivatives of Thermolysin written in VENUS format, I'm your man. On 12/12/2012 1:57 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote: Better option? Certainly not TAPE or electromechanical disk drive. CD's and DVD's don't last nearly that long and James Holton has pointed out. I suppose there might be a "cloud" solution where you rely upon data just floating around out there in cyberspace with a life of its own. Richard On Dec 12, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote: Good luck on your search in 100 years for a computer with a USB port. You will also need software that can read a FAT32 file system. Dale "Glad I didn't buy a lot of disk drives with Firewire" Tronrud On 12/12/2012 1:02 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote: SanDisk advertises a "Memory Vault" disk for archival storage of photos that they claim will last 100 years. (note: they do have a scheme for estimating lifetime of the memory, Arrhenius Equation ... interesting. Check it out: www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/<http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/> and click the Chronolock tab.). Has anyone here looked into this or seen similar products? Richard Gillilan MacCHESS ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Office: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-2926 http://lupo.jhsph.edu
