Submitted 2 months ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
how did these people not know that hard drives die??? CDs die. DVDs die. the only way to keep your data is to copy it periodically, and this has always been true.
ffs, fucking DNA survives because life keeps copying it all the time.
Optical discs like CDs and DVDs last a very long time if stored properly. It’s using them that kills them fast. So in terms of data archival they’re actually pretty good. Regardless, u right, make backups of backups and replace the media its stored on every once in a while.
Pressed optical disks, yes. Dye-based writable and re-writable do not last very long at all.
Depending on the disc, they can last anywhere from 5 to over 100 years. The over 100 year ones are (were?) marketed as archival, and only CD-R. Do not trust any random writable disc to survive very long.
I tested some backup DVDs from 2012 a couple of months ago and they were completely unreadable.
The music industry and failing to understand technology, name a more iconic duo.
I have a crate of old hard drives going back to the late nineties. Am I the only person that migrates the data to new drives regularly? At this point it is a yearly tradition for me to pick up larger drives during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales. Why rely on old 4tb drives when you can move them all to fresh 14tb drives?
NAS is another option instead of relying on random assortment of drives.
But it’s most cost-effective to use cold storage like Backblaze if you don’t need to access that data and just want to archive it.
What I meant by drives are NAS. I buy the drives on sale spin up a new array, migrate the data, and redirect the mount point.
I use to cold store until I realized that unless I have access to it, it might as well not exist. Now I keep everything live, even backups going back to 1997.
The only data I have “lost” are copies of my old warez CDs from eastern Europe because I have no idea where I have stashed them, and a pack of Zip Disks because I have no functioning Zip Drive.
I’m the opposite: I migrated 2 4TB drives from my first NAS into the actual one. The drives are going strong and nearing ten years (!) of run time. Two out of eight drives died in this server since 2017. Both were newer. I’m not going to change a single disk before it dies. Most value for money in my opinion.
But I can afford this „risk“: My server has a redundancy of 2 disks. It has a local USB backup, is mirrored to two remote servers in different locations with local backups as well.
One reason why I love btrfs is the ability to add (and remove) arbitrarily sized drives to the disk array while maintaining multiple redundant copies of my files.
unRAID can do this with both xfs and btrfs.
Drive failure in the 00s was really common. I lost 2 or 3 separate drives from different mfg over the course of a couple years. Newer drives are better but even in modern nas setups, I planned on losing at least 1 drive per year on a 4 drive nas even fresh out of the box.
Always keep data your care about in at least 3 places and in at least 2 different mediums with one preferably offsite. I like to have one drive in use, one backup that sync’s daily, and one that I keep in cold storage unplugged. Then swap the sync drve and cold storage drive every so often.
30 year old hard drives failing?
Color me shocked
I mean, don’t we all? Time erodes us all
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
It is. Magnetic type is still king.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Not really. Disk is king now since S3 storage took the crown when cloud services started offering cheap archiving. Anything still on disk from the 90s is some neglected archive that has been deemed by the company to have no value.
I would assume they’re finding this out now because they’re trying to feed their whole archive to the AI beast.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Yeah no, thats not an “archive” you are talking about thats just a bunch of storage. Archives are for things like historical, government, artistic data. That stuff sits in airtight cases on tape storage in a bunker.
Obviously any drive that is constantly in use to deliver data to customers is gonna die, thats never going to change. But these were actually intended to be used for archiving but failed at doing exactly that.
cm0002@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Disk is king when you need lots of active storage.
When it comes to archival Tape is king. I would never trust an HDD to be left unpowered for years like you could a tape cartridge.
And a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs for dirt cheap compared to the equivalent HDD
justinthegeek@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
S3 archive is on glacier which is all tape