To everyone reacting with some variation of stone tablets, please see askleo.com/stone-tablets/ and/or ua-cam.com/video/eC8YNhLbMqQ/v-deo.html . 🪨 Also, one of my points here isn't really to say one particular form of media is better than another (though of course some will be, and as the comments point out there's a wide variety of opinion 😱). The real takeaway here is that there is NO "best" media, and that in order to preserve data long term it should be a) backed up, and b) 👉🏻👉🏻periodically migrated to then-current storage technology👈🏻👈🏻.
Stone tablets are the best long term storage medium. They last for thousands of years. They might be destroyed, other media will be for certain. The only ones that won't are the golden records on the Voyager probes.
@@Nikioko Only because there's almost no friction in space and no oxidation, but in itself, it's a very soft metal and we truly have no idea if the info is still legible as there's no way of checking. I'm going with granite tablets😁
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) have a lifespan of 1000 years. They are CD size and write-once. You can buy an external writer for your PC/laptop for a reasonable price. Wikipedia: "In 2022, the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] Interagency Report NIST IR 8387[20](Page 12), stated that M-Disc is an acceptable archival format rated for up to 100 years+.
The ONLY solution to keeping important data is, multiple copies stored at diverse places on various media - AND scheduled rewrites every 10 years or so. It is not about media type or file format, it is about due process.
The difference between local storage and cloud storage is that local storage can't change its terms and conditions at any time, unless YOU feel like changing the terms an conditions.
Yes.... thank you very big.... you know have 1TB of cloud storage for one year Free.... 11 months down the line Your free storage will be coming to an end in 30 days upgrade now to either a 6 month contract or a 1 year contract for £90 for six months or £150 for a year..... I found that out when i bought my Htc phone all those years ago...
That's why you should have both, to give you a true backup instead of simple data redundancy. The cloud portion is for catastrophic problems, local is for more mundane problems.
I'd never use cloud storage for backups as it requires an internet connection. If the net goes down, you're screwed. Not to mention the fact that it's simply not practical or reliable to backup thousands of files totalling many gigabytes or even terabytes. I also want active working backups, not files that are stored away that have to be downloaded/uploaded every time I make a change. I can't think of anything more tedious.
@@FlyboyHelosim there are automated solutions for this, no need to manually keep them updated. I use Backblaze and it's good for what it is. But yes, you do need to download for recovery. Or have a drive shipped to you.
Good advice! Remember, “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.” I use a 4 bay NAS with two drive failure protection (RAID 6 or Synology SHR-2) and replace bad drives as they fail. I also keep backup hard drives in cold storage and update/verify quarterly. I keep another hard drive at one of my kids houses, updated annually, in the event of fire or theft. I have data going back to the early 1980s with no loss.
> "Remember, “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.” That's really not a problem, unless you rely on cloud backups only, and refuse to encrypt your data with strong encryption, before sending it to a server. Cloud backups are ideal for your most important data, stuff you don't want to lose in a disaster, it's far more reliable and flexible than storing a hard drive at your kids place and only checking it annually. I go as far as saying that cloud storage is far more reliable and secure than how we store things at home. Mind you, I'm of course not telling people not to make any backups at home, because that wouldn't be very wise. > " use a 4 bay NAS with two drive failure protection" That's not a backup, it only protects your working data against a drive failure, it's basically a system that was invented to keep a server or client working when a drive fails, that's not the same as making a daily backup.
@devil96221 Depends on the drive. The most reliable are WD Gold and their 'Ultrastar' doppleganers. These things are literally THE most reliable drives on the planet currently. I use the 14TB, 18TB, 20TB and 22TB. They all use the CMR method of manufacture so they have ultimate flexibility and compatibility. Not the cheapest but worth every cent.
I can share some of my experience with USB, SD Cards, and SSDs since I actually tried this out. 5 years ago I decided to test this out, so I bought 10 USBs, 10 SD cards, 5 SSDs and stored the same 50 images on each one without compressing it. The plan was every year I would test 1 of each of these and check if they died. Year 1: - USB 1: First Test - nothing wrong - SD: First Test - nothing wrong - SSD: First Test - nothing wrong Year 2: - USB 1: Second Test - nothing wrong - USB 2: First Test - 17 images were corupted - SD: Second Test - nothing wrong - SD: First Test - 28 images were corupted - SSD: Second Test - nothing wrong - SSD: First Test - 3 images were corupted Year 3: - USB 1: Third Test - Worked, but 36 images corrupted - USB 2: Second Test - Worked, but no data - USB 3: First Test - Didn't work, wasn't recognized - SD: Third Test - Worked, but only 39 images corrupted - SD: Second Test - Worked, but no data - SD: First Test - Worked, but no data - SSD: Third Test - Worked, but 38 images corrupted (2 more than last time) - SSD: Second Test - Worked 14 image corrupted (11 more than last time) - SSD: First Test - Worked, but no data Year 4: At this point every device has lost data. The only devices that worked were the first tests. They all worked, but had corupted images. Year 5: The only devices that worked were the first tests. Nothing else worked at all and most the computer didn't even see. Summary: I think the first tests kept working because each year they were getting a charge when I tested it, but they still had corupted images, so it wasn't perfect. These were all just sitting in my closest during this time, so there wasn't any special environmental control. On the other hand I had a hard drive sitting in my trunk for 8+ and it still worked. One program didn't work after all this time and I'm not sure why, but all the individual files, images, music still worked.
@@akabaneaki The SSDs are the same ones you would put in your computer. External drives are typically just cases with a little dotter board to pass the signal over USB. You can even get USB -> SATA cables that do that same thing. This way you can just plug it into the drive.
Thats because you need to turn on your flash drive(ssd/usb/sd) every once 6 months to refresh the charge. If you did that, your data would prob not be corrupted after 5 years.
oh no, i have a flash drive thats been sitting here since 2019, i only power it on like once a year, i wonder how many files in it are corrupted now, omg
15 years ago, I started out with a 1.2 TB media server with 200 and 300GB drives. Over time as larger drives became less expensive, I upgraded, 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, etc. which allowed me to stay ahead of potential drive failures and keep up with ever expanding library of movies, TV series, etc. Today I have a 72TB media server I backup onto Seagate 5TB external portable drives. They can be had on sale for as low as $130CAD. I backup every 3-6 months which ensures I don't lose data from degradation of the magnetic bits on the platters. I never lost any media except during those questionable Seagate drive times 2011/2012. Portable backups allow me access to my media via OTG cable in the event of a blackout, etc. Personally I don't look for a format that will last 40-50 years, I keep up with/move to newer smaller drives. A single 1TB micro SD or 2TB NVME in an enclosure can hold as much media as my original large media server from 15 years ago.
In 2013 I lost every photo and movie I owned after transferring them all to a brand new Seagate 2tb HHD, which crashed in two days. Seagate offered a replacement, but that didn't get my data back. I vowed to never again own a Seagate product as long as I live!
@@justdoingitjim7095 Yup, I haven't touched a Seagate, except for portable backup drives. It is Western Digital black/gold for me or nothing. More expensive, but never had an issue in 10 years.
Same with reel to reel tapes, as with cassettes. They still play fine from the late 60's. A few that I had were on crummy quality that cased a lot of breaks, but otherwise the sound on them was still as good as when I originally bought them. Some of the ones I had were stored in a hot garage for years too and they still played okay. Magnetic tape seems to last a very long time, especially if stored properly and recorded on good quality tape.
@@D7H777 If some bits are lost in the analogue signal recorded for music, you won't notice as the errors are smeared out. It has to detoriate a lot before your ears will notice a change. However, digital information stored on tape can't accept bit errors to the same degree.
I like DVD-RAM. It's easy, drag and drop, and because of it's slower write speed of 3x, it's very stable and reliable and can be written to many times. The discs are of high quality and can last under 30 years. And unlike DVD-/+RW, they're scratch resistance. The downside is, it's only 4.7 GBs. But that makes it good for documents.
Great video!! what an important subject! My take is that, as Hard drive capacity keeps getting bigger and bigger, memories and important data are worth transferring and updating to new drives every year / 2 years. Always 2 copies. And one of them kept in a safe place as a backup. During lockdown I went back to the place where I grew up, and I took the time to go through all my "old stuff" boxes. I checked the contents of around 300 cds and DVDs, and every HHD and memory card I could find. As a very young musician, I bought a tape deck and transferred all my early demos, songs, to digital audio in my computer. And so on with everything. It felt good, really good. Buy an external drive every 2 years, and move everything there. keep the previous one as a backup, and just keep doing that. Thanks for this video. You just won a subscriber.
FAT has been around for 40 years, and I'm sure it will be around for another 40 years. The reason is it's kept updated, and the updated version is an expansion of the old version, a.k.a. backward compatibility. So the original format is still inside the current format. Backward compatibility was really a feature that let us use old data and programs, and it's a hallmark of IBM - Microsoft collaboration (you don't have that kind of treatment with your old Apple products).
The fact that it is updated with backwards compatibility has to do with each time looking back a shorter period and get users on the new thing easy because it was compatible with the last thing. This strategy will be broken when backwards compatibility is in the way of important new things like say performance for example. And even more if competition starts to do things without backwards compatibility and is getting ahead more and more. It's very hard to find examples but one of them might be that although WIndows as a OS for example is always been about backwards compatibility so users would have a way to migrate to the next version. But running 8 and 16 bit code form many versions ago is left out in the latest releases of Windows because there was less need for it and it hindered the reliability of newer version of the OS. Another example is that currently Apple has shown with release of their M1 that as a newcomer on the desktop CPU market they can produce a arm chip that is extremely competitive in performance to the x86 CISC designs Intel and AMD are making. NVidia even did buy ARM recently so it's is like people are starting to believe again that ARM (RISC design) might indeed be more effective then CISC. Might be that this is because faster chips keep getting bigger and bigger and keeping the thermal output under control by shrinking the size is getting more of a problem each generation that the solution of a simpler design (RISC) is the short term answer to going forward. Which might end the era of x86 compatibles something many of us find hard to believe. It's just examples of what might happen and that backwards compatibility is only done because the easy of transition from older to newer stuff is easier with backwards compatibility and therefor backwards compatibility has to be economic. As soon as not backward compatible new technology disrupts the economics then the flow of backwards compatibility will be broken. So your guess that FAT will be here for another 40 years is just a guess nothing more nothing less. And the whole story in this youtube episode was about the most sensible strategy being having copies (redundancy) and renew your media and formats when needed.
@@chinesepopsongs00 The thing about backward compatibility is access to a ready market. Adding FAT functionality will cost Microsoft .. how much? All I know, Linux has it for free, sooo ...
@@WATCHINGTHEWATCHERS Of course it will. There are software formats and hardware formats. Because of Moore Law, the cost of software formats (FAT, NTFS, exFAT, etc.) are diminishing toward zero. Hardware formats though, have to be manufactured. If for example, nobody manufacture cassette tape player anymore, it will be hard to read what is in it. That's where the need to "refresh" came from. From my own experience, the data inside my IDE hard drive are still readable after 20 years, but there are no more motherboard that support IDE. Thankfully, the cost of IDE to SATA converter is just a dollar or so.
The cloud for long term backup is a scary idea. Not to mention these clouds does not stays that long and/or will be expensive to keep. Harddisk getting bigger and cheaper still the practical solution.
Eeeh. The bigger the disks gets the more single point of failure they become. And the more space one have the more one collects. Making the problem just bigger. 1TB or even 512GB drivers are replaced with 4TB drives. But Having 4TB on 4 disks running in mirrors (2TB usable) is far better then 8TB on 2 disks. (4TB usable) Not to talk about 8TB drives and bigger. You need to buy so much storage just to get redundancy and it makes no sense when you are trying to keep as little as a 1TB cap on your stuff. Simply putting more data into a single drive just makes it harder to not put all eggs in to few basket. And the HDD speeds are not improving even now the space is increasing. IF anything big HDD's are making it harder to make real redundancies even now technically they are cheaper per GB. More heads and smaller head tolerances. Asking for stuff to go wrong. ;c There is no push in making more reliable drives. Just big big cheap. And anyone that cares to spread out copies on multiple drives has to pay to get the lower grade stuff with questionable reliability.
@@TheDiner50 i thought I was finally able to understand what to buy and what not to. But am just getting more confused now. Aaaa. Send help!!!!! I have gazillions of photos and videos, and five 64GB HP pen drives. But they're all full. My laptop's storage is also full. I need more storage. But am confused as to what should I buy. Hard drives? SSDs? CDs? Or just, some more pen drives?!???
@@abha1240 I haven't lost a single file in over 30 years of hard drive use. Hard drives will last on average 8 years if they get through the 1st year. I don't push it, so I retire drives when they are 3 to 5 years old, depending on whether the new drives are enough larger and cheap enough for me to purchase. I used to save files on CDs, DVDs, then Blu-rays and memory sticks, but I have too much material now. The only way for me is multiple hard drives. To be extra safe, store extra hard drive backups with friends or relatives as far away as possible, in case of major disaster.
from the 90's I always backed up every year until my files, videos from tapes, scanned film photos and old digital media from the early 2000's until present now reached 11 terabytes and counting. Hard drives are really reliable with proper storage, i put them to an airtight glass container
As far as long term media formats, you might have mentioned virtualization. Maybe you can't run the application with the proprietary format natively but you could run it in a VM. VM and other virtualization like containers I suspect will be around for a very long time. In any case, this was a very thorough coverage of backups. Thanks.
Good thing to point out. If that really is ones plan to read data long term. Maybe just maybe keep the software together with your data then. Since it is really fun going around searching for a dead companies software that is 10 years old. Or a alive company that have no reason to help you. Mmm. Or my favorite one for the last couple of years now. Software requiring internet access to a servers across the ocean. That shutdown 4 years ago. I shit you not there is stuff that you backup and think you got sorted. Just to find out later that on a fresh install system the software you are trying to install needs internet access to access a server for something completely irrelevant but mandatory to work. Dependencies are so fun! And having installers not bundled with all the required stuff like server access and DRM whatever whatever. If something can not be done offline from scratch you do not have a backup. There is real scenarios where backups where completely useless due to software being incomplete. Braking data that cost allot in upkeep that proved to be unusable...
This was quite timely. Before I migrated to HDD's for backup around 2001 I was burning everything to DVD+ media. I went through those discs today and some of them are 25 years old now. While a few were difficult to read the majority of them were still fine. I last checked them in 2006 and didn't really concern myself with them because everything has been carried along with successive HDD's since then. The discs were highly regarded media back then made by Japanese company TaioYuden? Which was the oem for a lot of upmarket brands back then. You always got what you paid for with DVD media and some were junk within a year.
I once decided to punch software into mylar-backed stainless steel tape. By gum, that stuff would last. The tape held 10 6-bit characters per inch. Assuming the tape was 0.005 inch thick, it would have required 386 cubic feet of tape to hold 1 GB. This was in the1960's. Times change.
That’s amazing Bob, what was the software for? As someone who grew up in the age of the internet it is truly amazing what people accomplished with what seems like such small data storage.
@@Calyrekt The software digitized the locations of little blobs on film. The blobs were images of sparks produced in detectors used in particle physics experiments. The computer was a DEC PDP-1 -- 12K 18-bit words, nominal 100K/200K instructions/second, depending on which instructions. The setup illuminated spots on a CRT, and cast an image of a spot onto exposed/developed film in a movie camera. A photo tube behind the film would set a bit if it saw the spot through clear film, and omit setting the flag if the image of a spark blocked the light from the CRT. The software measured the spark images and recorded their locations on magnetic tape. Other software executed calculations to figure out what happened in the "events" that produced the data. The system processed data from studies conducted at Harvard's Cambridge Electron Accelerator. The computer used germanium logic, drew about a kilowatt or two, and was painfully unreliable by today's standards. It measured about 20" W x 6' Long x 6' H, plus two six-foot-tall "magtape" drives, plus the desk-sized Type 30 CRT. The CRT's display was 10" x 10", 1K x 1K pixels. Programming language: assembly. The system was invented by the late Martin Deutsch, who named it SPASS, for SPark chamber Automatic Scanning System. (Yes, he knew the German word Spass...) (DEC - Digital Equipment Corp. CRT - cathode ray tube Magtape - 10" diameter reels, 1/2" tape, 2400 feet, 200 characters/inch)
@@archygrey9093 Yeah! I still have the 128 MB USB thumb drive I purchased from Micro Center in Tustin, CA in 2001 for the bargain price of $39.95! (It still works, BTW, although I don't store anything on it). At the time, it beat those terribly unreliable Iomega Zip drives we were using to store and share files!
@@Calyrekt In the early seventies I was using this tape to provide the ipl (boot)for Burroughs mainframes. Not totally indestructable though, it was pulled through the read head bloody fast using very fine sprocket holes running the lenght of the tape and this would wear.
I've been around so long I have a 1/2" digital tape of work from the early '80s that was created on a Digitial Equipment Corporation VAX11/780 system - way before the PC became ubiquitous. I still have the tape but it's just an artifact these days. It would take a lot to even find a place to read it. The same thing is true for a couple of 8" floppies from a CP/M system in the late '70s. There are also file formats such as when we used EZ Writer for Word processing in the early '80s which would require that software to be found and loaded (on MS-DOS). More critical to me are diagrams done in the '90s using Micrografx ABC Flowcharter. I still have that program but it will only run on 32-bit Windows. I have to keep a 32-bit Windows virtual machine to get to that data now.
Yep, I remember those 8-inch floppies well in the Navy and at Bechtel -- and they really were floppy to handle, too! And, yes, I remember ABC Flowcharter, too, which I recall using at JPL.
Spinning rust at the moment is still the best at the moment as long as you spin the dive up and access every now and then. I have ide drives that are all but 20 years old and the data is good, and I'm glad you agree.
@@brostenen thanks for the reply and it's nice to prove to some idiot that thinks we are all morons that it's not possible and that rot, wear etc kill the data and drive..👍
@@kevinkirkby1484 Well.... The drive is a rarity. 90 percent of miniscribe drives died back then. 😉😁 But yeah. Spinning platter drives or tape streamers are the best storage for long term data saving. Eventually everything will fail. Even the casettes that I have for my Commodore64 machines. Early floppy disks are the most reliable of floppy disks. Here I am thinking about 3.5 inch 3M disks from around 1987 to 1993. The Sony, verbatim and others that I have, are starting to fail. Only early 3M before they were branded Imation, are still error free. At least the ones that I am using for my Amiga's.
@@brostenen the old floppy, those where the days, as for the commodore, back then couldn't afford one but did have the old spectrum for home but where I worked we had an old mainframe with tape reels it was like being in a Bond movie and was used for accounting etc. A second hand 486 was my first real forea into the pc of today, some many £1000s of pounds and years later now they're just tools to use. Thank god spinning rust got cheaper.. The oldest drive I have now and it's been kept as a momento is an 80gb ide.. one day I might buy the adaptor just for the fun of it to see what happened to it.. that was from 1996..👍
@@kevinkirkby1484 Yup. I was able to look into the computer/mainframe room on my mothers work place around 1987 or something. She worked with drawing transformer stations and high voltage power lines. Those spinning tape reel's were something to behold. Personally I worked and saved up for my first computer in 1993. It was a Cyrix 486 slc2 50 megaherz. ET4000 gfx, Sound Galaxy soundcard and 120 megabyte harddisk. And of course 4 megabyte Ram. My parents bought an Unisys PW/2 Series 300 workstation in 1987. It was a 286 8/10 megaherz, EGA gfx, 640kb Ram and 20 megabyte harddrive. The most mind blowing was an optical mouse that needed a special metal plate as mouse pad. My friends and family members all went with Commodore. Cusin had a C64 in 1984-ish and my friends used Amiga500 from around late 1987 or early 1988. Just strange how things have evolved, some kind of ride, and I am happy and gratefull that I have been able to be on the ride. I remember all the social stuff around C64 and Amiga. Something that are let out today, when we see youtube videoes about old computers. I mean. A young person the age of 25, talking about Amiga today, can not know how we actually used Amiga's back then. It was like totally different back then.
Agreed on all points! I do think SSD could be a good backup medium for the coming 10-20 years. There's always an external enclosure you can buy to get it to work on the current connection technology. Even hard drives from 20-30 years ago can be accessed. With emulators and abandon ware software archives you can access a lot of old file formats, and if you're a developer you can create your own converter or even a floppy capture device as I have done. I've still got the first basic program I saved to tape as a kid, 99.8% of all floppy data from MSX, Amiga and PC era. One of the most important things is that you look after your data by always having multiple checked copies, in different physical locations at least 10km apart and move your data to fresh new media every 3-5 years. Available connection types and media will migrate at the same time. I went the same way from tape to floppy, to hard disk and plan to go to ssd soon. I don't like my data in the cloud though, doesn't feel right with some personal sensitive data. I own 6 SSDs over 10+ years and none have failed so far, wear level not even scratching 20%. It's also worth noting to have offline backups as well, to protect against viruses, ransomware and other data theft. The only thing you can be sure to last is pornography leaked to the internet, that will remain in this world indefinitely ;)
Ssd degrade when stored offline if temps are high, like 30-40C. They are rated for 1 year max, by Jedec. So don't rely on them for three years, unless every year you read them once fully, to allow drivebto refresh weak cells.
@@nilsfrahm1323 never heard about that before. Many ssds run at 30-40 degrees in the computer case so that would mean many ssds are at risk. Do you have a reference to the source material describing this issue?
@@imqqmi I would say 30-40C is low. But temperatures do effect how long the data is safe. The mitigating factore here is that data on the SSD is often re-written when in a PC. With a decent drive, at not silly temperatures, you should have nothing to worry about.
@@ombhamare522 newly bought storage device, a harddisk, ssd etc. Ssds are often smart enough to refresh the data periodically, or if you wish to force it, wipe a second drive, clone the data and use the second drive as primary. Repeat the process every year or so.
I believe for documents and stuff, Archives take a photo (microfiche), film negatives. For two reasons; the materials that modern polyester film stock is made of will last like 100 years; also if Civilization collapses and person can hold a negative up to the sun and see what's on it. But may not be able to access a disk.
Excellent video - thanks! I’ve been wondering for a long time if digitally stored info, photos, videos, etc will be accessible in the future. Need to have backup copies elsewhere besides one’s home in case disaster. Cloud storage, bank vault, maybe with family members, water tight storage container in ground are just a few ideas. Also, besides we, the original owners, who will even care when we are gone? Many of the younger generation could care less as they are focused on the here & now. Some older folk don’t care either. Yet many people hunger to learn about their ancestors.
Excellent discussion, I have been using a somewhat similar strategy I call "laddering" .. just like people who buy Certificates of deposit in "staggered fashion" where they get the five year interest rate, yet individual CD's mature every year .. or even every month giving continual access to funds .. yet, they are all five year CD's getting the highest interest. I stagger my transfer of data, photos and videos, where the oldest, likely one to two years, gets re-written to the latest technology and is then refreshed. I save the older original just in case I later notice a transcription error .. which hasn't yet happened. I have everything on HDD and also on quality SSD in this fashion and the 2.5" device archive slowly grows in size .. manageable size.
All my cheap DVDs I've burned more than a decade ago are fully readable without even slowdowns.. BluRays should be even more reliable since they use inorganic layer (except the mistake which LTH is) so optical is my first choice for backup to this day - it stood the test of time 😀
For DVDs and all recordable optical discs, storage environment is critical. They can be ruined by just a few weeks of exposure to sunlight, so keeping them in the dark, and at normal room temperature or slightly cooler, is necessary.
@@marianneoelund2940 You may think I'm joking but last summer I was moving and I forgot two at least decade old dual layer DVDs (one of the cheapest brands at the time - Ridata) in my car glove box for the whole summer. At the end of the summer I realized my mistake and tried to copy them. To my surprise both read perfectly. Keep in mind the temps around here are hitting 40°C during the summer and in the car was much hotter due to heat accumulation. Yes, good storing conditions are ideal but sometimes you may get lucky even with cheap discs (mostly depends on the individual disc quality).
i started doing backups of photos back when digital cameras were 640x480, on CD-Rs, then eventually on DVD-R when they became available. they're all very much readable in 2023, just checked them recently.
Same here. I have tons of CD/DVDs from the early 2000's (15-20 years old) and I've yet to find one that is unreadable. I haven't had them out in the sun, but they have certainly not been taken care of beyond the protection a drawer offers.
I have always thought of my digital presence and my presence in this world as a whole as a transient thing, that I should strive to leave as little behind as possible but as I grow older I start thinking of the old adage about "planting trees under whose shade you will never sit". This has given me something to think about.
Good advice, I have hard drives in multiple locations, also DVD & Blu-Ray backups plus major holiday photos printed as coffee table books which are also stored in the cloud by the printer company in case another copy needs to be ordered ... I have to admit most people don't have any back ups at all 😳
Funny enough, a few weeks ago I pulled out my floppies from 1986 (5.25 inches) C64 and all the data is still there. They were stored in the garage, so no heating, and at the same place I also kept my 3.5 inches floppies (Amiga) from 1989, and the same thing, no data loss at all. Yes, true, those are not HD, so little ticker track, only 880K, but still... it is there!
I still have an Amiga 2000HD and 4000 still operational as well as an Apple II GS. Much of the amiga files and disks still work. The 5 1/4’ floppies for the apple are not all working anymore but most still do
This is a thought that I have kept coming back to throughout the years as I think back to how technology and storage media have changed precipitously even within the last decade. Thank you for addressing them and I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion… diverse mediums and multiple backups are the only insurance policy. We don’t often think about catastrophic events that lead to data loss but it’s always within the realm of possibility. 😬
If paper burns in a fire, your digital media is almost certainly gone too. The disadvantage of paper is it’s difficult to back up offsite in multiple places if you have a lot of data.
actually, hard drives are not that fragile when turned off, assuming you dont drop them on the floor. The heads are parked and can take quite a bumb without issue.
M-Disc tech is dope. They are able to be so reliable because they actually etch the data in the plastic, which won't degrade easily like regular optical media
I just bought M-disk. I’ve had good look with hard drive backups though. but years ago at a jobsite. We had developed bad data on some sectors. When I went back to my archives, turns out,,the corrupted data had been copied on backups. I had to go back about one year old archives to get good data although some new data was missing. Drive had been overused, but I learned my lesson.
Good luck finding a drive that can read this disks in 10 or even 20 years from now. Most fairly new pcs today already don't have an optical drive anymore.
One of the things that I do is to generate md5 checksums for the files that I've stored, and I will periodically verify the checksums. when a disk started to fail some files failed to checksum correctly so I was able to retired that computer (it was in-home webserver), but my data is backed up (I have duplicates on other disk drives and 2 unique sets of DVDs storing the same data). Having worked at a company that did backup software back in the 1990s, I know horror stories that customers encountered that got them to get a commercial product.
Like him, I also did backup from CD R, move to DVD R, since I thought it's more resistant than HDD (in my mind, it can't be corrupted / infected with virus), but after reading somewhere else that Optical actually detoriate faster than HDD, and the trouble of spanning multiple DVDs I moved to HDD as well.
I am surprised magnetic tapes were not mentioned , eventoday this is the BEST and most durable media for archival purposes. the only downside would be the hardware device in the future, as companies keep increasing tape sizes and changing physical size so its the only risky part, maybe next year you will not find any ultrium device with support for DLT or any affordable DTA reader , even today the reader alone costs a lot. but strictly speaking of the media, I do believe it is still the most durable.
Don't be on SSDs for long-term storage. After a 13 month old 1/2 TB external SSD failed (one month after warranty expiration, of course) I contacted a professional data recovery company, with an expectation that I could recover the data, but that that recovery might be quite expensive. They had a minimum recovery fee of about $250 and said their fees could run into the thousands of dollars. Getting the estimate was free, however. But, after shipping the SSD to them, they told me there was nothing they could do, regardless of how much money I might be willing to pay. They further told me that in their experience, SSDs were no more reliable than standard disk drives, and have a failure rate that was about the same.
Buying an SSD is confusing, you have to look at the actual specs. QLCs are the first to go (only lasting a few thousands write cycles at BEST), while TLCs will lasts somewhat longer (3000 to 5000 or so cycles), MLC next in line to blow, clocking in at 10k to 30k cycles. Finally SLC is the "best of the breed" and will lasts 50k cycles at the LEAST. Some will even goes strong for 100k cycles! What I would do? I would get used MLCs/SLCs depending on the price and ENTERPRISE grade with QUALITY features (ECC, power protection, etc) that still makes the grade. Will costs you as much as a brand stinking QLC/TLC disk but will lasts as long if not longer and be more reliable to boot (so the controller will be less likely to fry, to have temp issues, etc).
Older SSDs were based on SLC or MLC, so they would last for significantly much longer than the TLC or QLC SSDs of today. Nowadays, please just use HDD for long term storage
@@RonLarhz SSD should not be considered as legitimate storage but rather hardware booster. When the controller chip fried, the data is gone for good. As for HDD, partial data recovery may be done by removing the faulty disc/header and rescuring those intact files. Anyway the best/cost effective storage for home users may by copying files to HDDs and then disconnect them from power source.
My answer would be...multiple. Just copy everything irreplaceable into at least 3 locations and different types of storage/backup. The more spread out and diversified the better. All forms of storage can fail, even storing something in a self-storage warehouse, with an iron-mountain style archiving company, or a bank vault, all can fail.
You really need some form of open source filesystem that can scan for and scrub bitflips using a combination of duplicate data and checksums (or some better ecc check). Open source is critical for the long term, keeping in mind that you also need to store copies of the source (It can even be lazer printed if not too bloated, its just text after all). Many companies have gone out of business leaving customers with unuseable software and no support decades later. Simply saving multiple copies (minimum 3) can fill this role to some degree, but you still need to compare them against each other on a scheduled basis, every couple of years. It also helps to make hashes of chunks of data(smaller chunks are better) to help identify which copy has the flaw when a scan shows they don't match anymore. The 3rd copy can be used to confirm exactly which bits have changed.
One free option is to open a special e-mail account. A paragraph or two can be written to add some dimension to the photographs which can be added as an attachment. Then go to that account and archive the e-mail.
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is the way to go if you want to throw the media in a safe for 30 years. Maybe not too practical for the average consumer though.
@@rty1955 That's one of the big issues with tape backup. I remember reading a story of the Grim Fandango remaster, and they backed their source code on obsolete tapes. They almost didn't have a way of reading them until they stumbled across a drive in a storage unit.
You can ALSO use a utility like parchive to create parity files that will help restore the original files if they go south and YOU decide what percentage to use. Store the original file on one and the p-files on another. It lessens the concerns but there are still a chance of loss.
Very interesting, I always save my data on Floppy Discs, CD Rom, USB stick, SD Card, A plug in Hard Drive and the Computers SSD D Drive. When I change something on any file it gets saved on all six formats, I doubt all six are going to fail at the same time.
The suck part about moving paper to digital are the ridiculous government entities that require a paper document with a seal or raised seal for it to be official, such as VA documents, birth records, or even medical documents that have not gone digital. In most cases that I have experienced different doctors offices that cannot read a disk from somewhere else. I for one am sick of the paper, no paper storage. I have a handful of thumbdrives and just recently obtained a new laptop. After watching a video you posted, I removed an old hard drive AND the dvd player, bought the cases and now have external both. All these years, I protested against the new stuff not knowing I could remove my old dvd player and still use. I came from the old tower generation, easy to tear apart and rebuild and never endeavored to the insides of a laptop. Lol. Thanks for teaching an old dawg new tricks.
You mention that paper is flammable, but I think it is also important to mention that hard drives (external or internal) are mechanical devices and, as such, are suspectible to mechanical damage. Drop one on the floor and you might have to spend a considerable amount of money to fix it and/or restore the information on it. SSD drives are also not completely safe from common mechanical damage, such as being dropped. I keep my archives on two mediums - an external hard drive and an SSD drive.
My history as an old geek : the more reliable storage I had tested : 1-Cassettes, I have cassettes from the early 80s (ZX Spectrum, C64) still working perfectly for nearly 9/10. 2-5.25 floppy disks, 7/10 still working 3-HDD drive, 6/10 and also incompatible formats or hardware protocols/connectors (RLL, MFM, early IDE, early SCSI ...). 3-USB sticks / memory cards 5-6/10 and also about memory cards, the problem of old formats (Memorystick, Smartmedia, CFI/II, ...) 4-3.5 floppy 4/10 5-CD, DVD, ... less than 3/10 The best system is punched tapes, even after 3/4 of a century, almost 100% are still readable but I never used it and who still needs it ? I don't know yet about SSD but till now seem quite reliable. About cloud storage, what if your supplier go bankrupt ? The best option for important data is multiple copies, and ideally at least one on a offline storage. This is of course for long term storage/reliability, for years.
I'd say, for USB sticks there should be a rule "the older it is, the longer it will work" written somewhere. I've got a 2GB 20 years old USB stick which still works, and I've got a dozen of 32+GB USB3 thumb drives dead after 1 just year of usage. Sometimes even less.
@@OlegLecinsky Indeed but it's always the same when a tech appears, often this tech is in competition with established standards, is more expensive and less compatible (as quite new) and customers must be convinced, therefore the companies make those new devices as reliable as possible, when it's became the standard, and the prices have drastically decrease, which companies still care about reliability, the only goal is maximizing profit and to maximize profit, the easiest way is quality shortcuts It's why a 1977 8" 120Ko floppy disk is more reliable than a 1993 3.5" 1.44 disk, or a 2001 8MB Smartmedia card is more reliable than a 2023 SDXC, because the 1977 floppy costed more than a box of10x 3.5" or the SM card because it costed more than the camera it was made for.
Most all of the deficiencies you mentioned for paper also exist for all the other digital media you mentioned. Original copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist and are readable. Hard disks will likely have rusted to dust in the same time frame.
I'm still a fan of film photography and some of the most precious historical (photographic) images were the old methods. There are photographic prints and negatives still in existence that are over 130 years old. If stored correctly, I'm guessing they could last even longer. Fire and flood notwithstanding....
@@MohsinExperiments Great idea but it would need to be small and even at a pin prick scale it would reach to the moon and back just for one 1gig of information.
ZFS boys and girls, ZFS. A nice RaidZ3 setup with auto snapshotting, and auto backup of snapshots to a backup server, that is powered up once a month to take those backups, with that server being powered down the rest of the time. You're pretty golden.
The best option is a USB external hard drive for the typical home user. When it comes to companies then I would suggest an off-site backup and restore company.
No... Never let another company handle your data, if you are a big company. Do it in house, but set up a mirror drive, spanning different locations. Years ago, it was called i-scsi. But always in house, because if your data is extremely valuable, you need to eliminate someone else doing it for you.
No way!!! People, don't do it. I used an external hard drive and it failed. It was very difficult to realize that I'd lost so many photos. From now on, I print the photos.
@@irmasanchez5274things I printed 20 years ago are getting too fragile to handle. Be sure to print on archive quality paper and with "ink that won't fade away.
If you can stomach the upfront cost of a LTO Tape machine and like 5-20 tapes. Maybe LTO 4-6 is a good starting point. Then use Veeam community. Then just back up the whole PC, NAS... Make a few full backup tapes with no compression. Remember the encryption key and you are good to go. As a Home user I feel safe to have tape cover the "everything digital" and make an annually backup each one is safe for 30 years since they date it was written. I have never slept so sound.
I have my data stored in all my computers, hard drives, USB thumb drives, external SSD. It doesn't hurt to have redundant storage. I also have emulators such as Amiga Forever to read long gone formats.
For our family photos I currently keep them stored on a Synology NAS with 2 drive fault protection. I have that backed up to another Synology NAS at our business. Then I have them backed up to Crashplan and Backblaze B2. I am contemplating making a copy on RDX tape or Optical Discs. Part of me wonders if my kids and their kids will appreciate me doing all of this, but It makes me happy. :)
On cd's and DVD's - wauw what a job. I do have a big box on the attic with 300+ DAT tapes...if anyone wants them... I do have 10 (1 or 2 TB) external HD's. And dropped a few and they died. I did also keep the HD's from old computers, 300GB, 500GB, 2TB.Actually they all still work. (And I did not drop them...) The nice thing is, they only run when I connect them - for the rest they are nicely stored in the drawer. Thanks for the video!
Hard Disks for long term storage? Possibly they last a very long time if they are used and then stored, but spinning hard drives in a computer will sometimes crash. Usually not a question of if it will crash as when will it will crash. I have had a number of Hard Disks crash and they usually aren't accessible any more, unless you pay expensive recovery fees, with doubtful results. Hard Disks are reliable for the most part, but I would never rely on them for truly long term storage. I have had some that have lasted for years; others that crashed within a year or so. The cloud is the way to go, along with at least one or two other backups, one of which should be stored offsite.
"The cloud is the way to go" That's just someone else's hard drives. They also crash. However, using Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) nearly eliminates data loss in that scenario.
@@thomasmaughan4798 Cloud may be more reliable because hdds can be replicated, multiple copies, backups in multiple data centers and they monitor daily the smart data from the hdds. Also temperature control is a plus. While a user may not check smart info, may seldom turn on the hdd, which may cause problems due to motor spinning up, straining the electronics.
@@nilsfrahm1323 "Cloud may be more reliable" I notice the word "might". Indeed, this cloud might be more reliable than that one; and the path between you and the cloud might be reliable, maybe not. It also depends on the user's own expertise in such matters. As I have multiple RAID5 NAS's and external USB spindisks I am pretty well protected and do not depend on the internet to reach my stuff. I do not trust SSD for anything other than transport.
@@thomasmaughan4798 Nas can be vulnerable to power surge, software errors in filesystem, ransomware, virus in network. Hdd inside may be all same brand or same batch, making a defect in that batch a point of failure. Flooding, eathquakes, thieves can affect a region, if all nas are in same region, your data is lost. Also government may come and seize your hardware in case of suspicion you did something wrong. Cloud data may protect you from that. Internet access may be down for brief period, but in a few weeks you can get your data back. Even if internet is blocked in your country, you may ask a friend in other country to save a snapshot of your data. So it's good to have alternatives, as no single method is perfect.
I use a raid array that I copy files to from my other computers. Redundant backup with parity! I still copy the contents of the array to an extenal drives at intervals.
I've been in the IT field since 1980 and all media has its limitations, but that said -- when I started we used Reel to Reel tape for everything we backed up (even the 20 Meg super sized removable platters in the mini-car size disk drives (joke!)). The above being said, what I have had the best luck storing data on was Dat Tape, I've had backups that I could read 20+ years later with an old SCSI or USB Dat drive -- I know most folks think that's funny ! Leo's right about one thing, you want to keep that information really long term, keep it migrating to new media. But If I want something that I can just put away and forget for a few years, its going to be put on tape and stored in a cool dry place.
Thanks for the video! Glad someone else thinks about this as much as I do. You validated the way I was thinking about this subject. Thanks to the comments below who mentioned the PDF/A - Archival and looking up what the Smithonian Uses for digital information- I will look into these items too.
hard drives fired up once a year are best, the rest of the time they can stay on a shelf ! a trick with flash memory/ssd's is to make the back up when they are warm, this improves the noise margin
It doesn't really matter which you choose. But you have to have a means of accessing data on that media. We've been fortunate for 40+ years that most media is accessible on a current desktop computer, exceptions include SCSIbased media and external/internal tape. I still have a W2K 1999 working computer for accessing all my data, 2940scsi included.
Going on 9 years on a 4 bay raid 5 system. I have replaced the drives when bad sectors are reported and the. Software rebuilds the new drive into the array. I always use WD enterprise gold drives.
A backup disk left attached to the computer is a good idea. There are programs that back up to it daily, or continuously. In addition to this disk, I recommend 3 others that are attached once a month (in rotation), backed up, and then stored in plastic boxes with desiccant packages. Store in a cool, dry place. I use cloud storage for data that is not sensitive. That I wouldn't care if someone hacked. Some people here oppose cloud servers. I get that, but I have tons of stuff that I couldn't care less if you hacked, such as physics papers. I doubt the cloud server will be hacked, but even if it is, you will not lose the data. They will restore a backup.
I rsync my data every night to TWO local hard drives, and then remotely to a drive/computer located in a different town far away from my home in case of unforeseen natural disasters.
The most robust media is Magneto-optical disc or MO-disc. It is resistant to light and magnetic field. 1.3GB 3.5in disc is the biggest and latest that you can easily find media and drive. Another robust media is 50nm SLC flash, the biggest common one is intel X25-E 64GB 2.5in SATA drive. A lightly used one stored in cool environment should last decades.
I have two external hdd and then I used the windows disc manager to make them RAID 1. Should be ok as time to time we can check if one of them needs replacement. So far working well!
File formats, I've got a load of stuff in the old lotus file formats. MS dropped support for that a while back, luckily I 1) don't really need it and 2) libre office will still open it. The enough copies thing is very important I know a few people who lost everything because they had one backup. Heck I've twice had 2 simultaneous disk fails, luckily there were other backups.
While not really addressing the point of the video, I find that with the periodic OS upgrades imposed on us by Microsoft and Apple, we tend to upgrade the hardware and its backups every few years for most folks, maybe 6 to 10 years for me. As a result, I do not have any "old media" in use. For example, When I was deep into OS/2 in the 1980s and 90s, I used 3.5" floppies for storage. When compatibility problems forced me to move to XP, I had to selectively move my programs and data to the new OS, and switched to CD storage for the larger volumes required by newer programs. Yes, I still have an XP machine with a 3.5" and 5" floppy drive, just in case some blast from the past shows up. (I do not know if those old floppy drives are still supported in Win-10.) I toy with the idea of clearing the XP machine and reloading OS/2 to play with. It really was a decade ahead Windows in terms of lack of system loading, operational speed, and easy to fine tune to one's needs, but IBM never supported its expansion beyond IBM's needs, which was an OS which could easily interface with its commercial mainframe systems.
storing anything that is electronic in nature is also subject to HOW you store something - like is the humidity controlled, temperature controlled, etc, as much as the quality of what you stored.. For example, electronics that are left in a moist environment can and sometimes do become excessively corroded. Those little flash thumb drives -- yep. Hard drives - perhaps. One place many will choose thoughtlessly to store such media - well, a FIREPROOF safe, of course. Well, in a fireproof safe, often the material lining such safes has a high moisture content - and can cause high humidity within the safe themselves. How do I know ? Well, I used to save passwords at work- which means a well ventilated/air conditioned space - and after about 6 months, the thumb drives no longer functioned; tore the drives apart, and it was just a corroded green mess under. Maybe storing them in vacuum sealed bags might have worked; maybe buying higher quality thumb drives might have worked. I don't know. Just beware that a fireproof safe while it brings some protections, it introduces other potential issues. Same thing with storing things in basements, or attics.. Or when you have movers that pack up your hard drives with your memories as well.
I had two same external HDD from western digital, not use them much, maybe once in month, and they stop working in about 5 years. Also old laptop integrated HDD stop working, but in 10 years, not sure was it westernd digital.
I feel best way to store things is to compress them as much as possible then store them everywhere HDDs and free cloud, that's the best way to go about it cost effectively, otherwise you have to have a server like database with raid and keep throwing out the old hard drives
I'm one step ahead, I keep my files on two HDD disks. With a cloning device, independent of a computer with single button operation, to keep back ups quick and convenient.
I see many people talking about formats and number of backups......people seem to forget the connectivity issue. 20 years from now you may have data on DVD or Hard drive but you may not have SATA connection anymore. I already went through this once when I had to connect IDE drive to my SATA mobo. So dont worry about your hard drive lasting.......worry about sata lasting....once M2 becomes the norm, you will have problem finding hardware to run your old hard drive.
There remains a solution for IDE - there are USB external IDE connectors, for example. I expect the same for SATA for a very long time as well. But the point is well taken - that's why I recommend copying to current technology, whatever it may be, periodically.
1) Have your own operating system. Include the source code, compiler and compiler's compiler. 2) Have a universal reader and backup software with a source that you can compile. Which means that you have to have a compiler and a compiler's compiler. 3) A reliable hard disk and external drive for periodic auto backup. There are problems with the motherboard. 4) Your present system must be able to save data in the old format. 5) I've already lost much data on CD. I cannot retrieve any data because the CD is practically blank and my CD drive is reading my CDs endlessly. 6) If everything is lost, I hope you have the energy and time to type the source codes, recompile them and rebuild your data with OCR if you still have your data on scannable material. 7) What is needed is a system (with ports for flash drives and drives for floppies, 1.44, zip disks, CDs and DVDs) and storage media that are dedicated to store data for many many years.
Always think worst case scenario. I have my most coveted files backed up on physical devices and in the cloud. When you reach the level of paranoia that I have you know that, well, server farms can burn down and take your data with it. To combat this, I have given a relative that I trust an external drive containing files that I must have in case one of these nightmare scenarios come to fruition.
if you store your CDs/DVDs in a dark room with controlled environment (temperature & humidity), they'll last easily for over 30-35 years. some of my CDs and DVDs are more than 25 years and they still work flawlessly. I trust less hard disks for long term backups since they're mechanical... so I change them every 8-10 years.
I met an audio Engineer who taught me how to backup files to DVDs. Rule 1: Don't write at high speed so as to reduce Writting errors. 2: Don't write more than 65% of the maximum capacity. 3: store it properly 4: have multiple copies of the same content.
I still had some 25 year old IDE HDDs. I picked up an inexpensive IDE to USB enclosure and migrated everything I wanted to keep to a 4Tb USB HDD. In another 25 years I'll migrate everything important off of it to the lastest 500Tb USB HDD. That's how I've always held on to my old data.
I do agree that hard drives are the best way, also in my opinion, the best long term storage media are using hash codes, generate a hash from the files, if even a bit is changed, you'll know it, so you can store the data on two different medias, that's more important, knowing if the file gets corrupted is more important than the media itself
You need at least one copy on hard drive on another location to be safe from fire, flooding, earthquake and so on. I prefer 3,5" HDD over 2,5" HDD as data uses more physical space on the drive
About formats made me think about my dad, he loves and stores a lot of stuff in a program called lotus calendar he still uses it in a virtual machine because so much contact info, birthdays, notes and other stuff he built up over the years is stored in it the company that makes it is still around but has moved to a 'cloud native pay your soul blablabla' operation style still lacking the stuff he uses so he never switched... it's good to consider that kind of stuff as well and i almost forgot about it
I am 'comfortable with paper'. I have the complete works of Shakespeare with critical essays and illustrative plates in a single book from the 1890's. Beautifully bound and still readable ha ha as he said. There's something about paper. For some research documents I have been writing I have included the data files in appendices in 4 point font and printing an archive for a filing cabinet. The 11 point and 4 point fonts are readable by a scanner. I will never need it but there is something about paper...
The best long-term storage is Blu-ray high capacities vacuum sealed and put into sleeves and then stored in a cool dry place.i have cds from 1990 that are in perfect pristine condition and are still 1000% readable
To everyone reacting with some variation of stone tablets, please see askleo.com/stone-tablets/ and/or ua-cam.com/video/eC8YNhLbMqQ/v-deo.html . 🪨
Also, one of my points here isn't really to say one particular form of media is better than another (though of course some will be, and as the comments point out there's a wide variety of opinion 😱). The real takeaway here is that there is NO "best" media, and that in order to preserve data long term it should be a) backed up, and b) 👉🏻👉🏻periodically migrated to then-current storage technology👈🏻👈🏻.
You're absolutely right 👍
Stone tablets are the best long term storage medium. They last for thousands of years. They might be destroyed, other media will be for certain. The only ones that won't are the golden records on the Voyager probes.
@@Nikioko Only because there's almost no friction in space and no oxidation, but in itself, it's a very soft metal and we truly have no idea if the info is still legible as there's no way of checking. I'm going with granite tablets😁
@@psylentrage Oxidation isn’t really a problem for gold, unless you use Aqua Regis.
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) have a lifespan of 1000 years. They are CD size and write-once. You can buy an external writer for your PC/laptop for a reasonable price.
Wikipedia: "In 2022, the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] Interagency Report NIST IR 8387[20](Page 12), stated that M-Disc is an acceptable archival format rated for up to 100 years+.
The ONLY solution to keeping important data is, multiple copies stored at diverse places on various media - AND scheduled rewrites every 10 years or so. It is not about media type or file format, it is about due process.
well said
True. This also solves the problem of compatibility with new technology interface
this
YES! This is the only answer.
100% correct
The difference between local storage and cloud storage is that local storage can't change its terms and conditions at any time, unless YOU feel like changing the terms an conditions.
Yes.... thank you very big.... you know have 1TB of cloud storage for one year Free....
11 months down the line Your free storage will be coming to an end in 30 days upgrade now to either a 6 month contract or a 1 year contract for £90 for six months or £150 for a year.....
I found that out when i bought my Htc phone all those years ago...
That's why you should have both, to give you a true backup instead of simple data redundancy. The cloud portion is for catastrophic problems, local is for more mundane problems.
I'd never use cloud storage for backups as it requires an internet connection. If the net goes down, you're screwed. Not to mention the fact that it's simply not practical or reliable to backup thousands of files totalling many gigabytes or even terabytes. I also want active working backups, not files that are stored away that have to be downloaded/uploaded every time I make a change. I can't think of anything more tedious.
You’re forgetting the bigger difference, a whole lotta money.
@@FlyboyHelosim there are automated solutions for this, no need to manually keep them updated. I use Backblaze and it's good for what it is. But yes, you do need to download for recovery. Or have a drive shipped to you.
Good advice! Remember, “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.” I use a 4 bay NAS with two drive failure protection (RAID 6 or Synology SHR-2) and replace bad drives as they fail. I also keep backup hard drives in cold storage and update/verify quarterly. I keep another hard drive at one of my kids houses, updated annually, in the event of fire or theft. I have data going back to the early 1980s with no loss.
> "Remember, “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.”
That's really not a problem, unless you rely on cloud backups only, and refuse to encrypt your data with strong encryption, before sending it to a server.
Cloud backups are ideal for your most important data, stuff you don't want to lose in a disaster, it's far more reliable and flexible than storing a hard drive at your kids place and only checking it annually. I go as far as saying that cloud storage is far more reliable and secure than how we store things at home. Mind you, I'm of course not telling people not to make any backups at home, because that wouldn't be very wise.
> " use a 4 bay NAS with two drive failure protection"
That's not a backup, it only protects your working data against a drive failure, it's basically a system that was invented to keep a server or client working when a drive fails, that's not the same as making a daily backup.
How often do the drives fail?
@@Jake-mn1qcHow to encrypt data before backup?
@devil96221 Depends on the drive. The most reliable are WD Gold and their 'Ultrastar' doppleganers. These things are literally THE most reliable drives on the planet currently. I use the 14TB, 18TB, 20TB and 22TB. They all use the CMR method of manufacture so they have ultimate flexibility and compatibility. Not the cheapest but worth every cent.
I am happy someone mention NAS. This is the perfect solution.
I can share some of my experience with USB, SD Cards, and SSDs since I actually tried this out.
5 years ago I decided to test this out, so I bought 10 USBs, 10 SD cards, 5 SSDs and stored the same 50 images on each one without compressing it. The plan was every year I would test 1 of each of these and check if they died.
Year 1:
- USB 1: First Test - nothing wrong
- SD: First Test - nothing wrong
- SSD: First Test - nothing wrong
Year 2:
- USB 1: Second Test - nothing wrong
- USB 2: First Test - 17 images were corupted
- SD: Second Test - nothing wrong
- SD: First Test - 28 images were corupted
- SSD: Second Test - nothing wrong
- SSD: First Test - 3 images were corupted
Year 3:
- USB 1: Third Test - Worked, but 36 images corrupted
- USB 2: Second Test - Worked, but no data
- USB 3: First Test - Didn't work, wasn't recognized
- SD: Third Test - Worked, but only 39 images corrupted
- SD: Second Test - Worked, but no data
- SD: First Test - Worked, but no data
- SSD: Third Test - Worked, but 38 images corrupted (2 more than last time)
- SSD: Second Test - Worked 14 image corrupted (11 more than last time)
- SSD: First Test - Worked, but no data
Year 4:
At this point every device has lost data.
The only devices that worked were the first tests.
They all worked, but had corupted images.
Year 5:
The only devices that worked were the first tests.
Nothing else worked at all and most the computer didn't even see.
Summary:
I think the first tests kept working because each year they were getting a charge when I tested it, but they still had corupted images, so it wasn't perfect. These were all just sitting in my closest during this time, so there wasn't any special environmental control.
On the other hand I had a hard drive sitting in my trunk for 8+ and it still worked.
One program didn't work after all this time and I'm not sure why, but all the individual files, images, music still worked.
excuse me but by hard drive do u mean the external hard disk we still use nowadays? :3 (sorry, not that tech savvy here)
@@akabaneaki The SSDs are the same ones you would put in your computer. External drives are typically just cases with a little dotter board to pass the signal over USB.
You can even get USB -> SATA cables that do that same thing. This way you can just plug it into the drive.
Thats because you need to turn on your flash drive(ssd/usb/sd) every once 6 months to refresh the charge. If you did that, your data would prob not be corrupted after 5 years.
if i store my data on eksternal hdd and eksternal ssd(plugged every month) which one last longer ?
oh no, i have a flash drive thats been sitting here since 2019, i only power it on like once a year, i wonder how many files in it are corrupted now, omg
15 years ago, I started out with a 1.2 TB media server with 200 and 300GB drives. Over time as larger drives became less expensive, I upgraded, 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, etc. which allowed me to stay ahead of potential drive failures and keep up with ever expanding library of movies, TV series, etc. Today I have a 72TB media server I backup onto Seagate 5TB external portable drives. They can be had on sale for as low as $130CAD. I backup every 3-6 months which ensures I don't lose data from degradation of the magnetic bits on the platters. I never lost any media except during those questionable Seagate drive times 2011/2012. Portable backups allow me access to my media via OTG cable in the event of a blackout, etc. Personally I don't look for a format that will last 40-50 years, I keep up with/move to newer smaller drives. A single 1TB micro SD or 2TB NVME in an enclosure can hold as much media as my original large media server from 15 years ago.
In 2013 I lost every photo and movie I owned after transferring them all to a brand new Seagate 2tb HHD, which crashed in two days. Seagate offered a replacement, but that didn't get my data back. I vowed to never again own a Seagate product as long as I live!
THINGS ARE ALWAYS CHANGING…
@@justdoingitjim7095 THAY ARE GARBAGE I USE WESTERN DRIVES SO FAR NO TROUBLE…STORED IN EMP/CME CERTIFIED STORAGE CONTAINERS !!
@@justdoingitjim7095 Yup, I haven't touched a Seagate, except for portable backup drives. It is Western Digital black/gold for me or nothing. More expensive, but never had an issue in 10 years.
I bet it wasnt even seagates fault it was yours, maybe you accidentally formatted it. Dont hate on seagate, its not 2013 anymore.
I have got cassette tapes I recorded onto in 1970 and they still play back ok today.
Same with reel to reel tapes, as with cassettes. They still play fine from the late 60's. A few that I had were on crummy quality that cased a lot of breaks, but otherwise the sound on them was still as good as when I originally bought them. Some of the ones I had were stored in a hot garage for years too and they still played okay. Magnetic tape seems to last a very long time, especially if stored properly and recorded on good quality tape.
@@D7H777 If some bits are lost in the analogue signal recorded for music, you won't notice as the errors are smeared out. It has to detoriate a lot before your ears will notice a change.
However, digital information stored on tape can't accept bit errors to the same degree.
I have DVD's that I burned in 2009 and they are garbage.
go digital. Eventually your player will brake and it will take a fortune to repair it.
Same here. I have many cassettes form the mid 70s that play perfectly today.
I like DVD-RAM. It's easy, drag and drop, and because of it's slower write speed of 3x, it's very stable and reliable and can be written to many times. The discs are of high quality and can last under 30 years. And unlike DVD-/+RW, they're scratch resistance.
The downside is, it's only 4.7 GBs. But that makes it good for documents.
Great video!! what an important subject! My take is that, as Hard drive capacity keeps getting bigger and bigger, memories and important data are worth transferring and updating to new drives every year / 2 years. Always 2 copies. And one of them kept in a safe place as a backup. During lockdown I went back to the place where I grew up, and I took the time to go through all my "old stuff" boxes. I checked the contents of around 300 cds and DVDs, and every HHD and memory card I could find. As a very young musician, I bought a tape deck and transferred all my early demos, songs, to digital audio in my computer. And so on with everything. It felt good, really good. Buy an external drive every 2 years, and move everything there. keep the previous one as a backup, and just keep doing that.
Thanks for this video. You just won a subscriber.
FAT has been around for 40 years, and I'm sure it will be around for another 40 years. The reason is it's kept updated, and the updated version is an expansion of the old version, a.k.a. backward compatibility. So the original format is still inside the current format.
Backward compatibility was really a feature that let us use old data and programs, and it's a hallmark of IBM - Microsoft collaboration (you don't have that kind of treatment with your old Apple products).
The fact that it is updated with backwards compatibility has to do with each time looking back a shorter period and get users on the new thing easy because it was compatible with the last thing. This strategy will be broken when backwards compatibility is in the way of important new things like say performance for example. And even more if competition starts to do things without backwards compatibility and is getting ahead more and more. It's very hard to find examples but one of them might be that although WIndows as a OS for example is always been about backwards compatibility so users would have a way to migrate to the next version. But running 8 and 16 bit code form many versions ago is left out in the latest releases of Windows because there was less need for it and it hindered the reliability of newer version of the OS. Another example is that currently Apple has shown with release of their M1 that as a newcomer on the desktop CPU market they can produce a arm chip that is extremely competitive in performance to the x86 CISC designs Intel and AMD are making. NVidia even did buy ARM recently so it's is like people are starting to believe again that ARM (RISC design) might indeed be more effective then CISC. Might be that this is because faster chips keep getting bigger and bigger and keeping the thermal output under control by shrinking the size is getting more of a problem each generation that the solution of a simpler design (RISC) is the short term answer to going forward. Which might end the era of x86 compatibles something many of us find hard to believe. It's just examples of what might happen and that backwards compatibility is only done because the easy of transition from older to newer stuff is easier with backwards compatibility and therefor backwards compatibility has to be economic. As soon as not backward compatible new technology disrupts the economics then the flow of backwards compatibility will be broken. So your guess that FAT will be here for another 40 years is just a guess nothing more nothing less. And the whole story in this youtube episode was about the most sensible strategy being having copies (redundancy) and renew your media and formats when needed.
@@chinesepopsongs00 The thing about backward compatibility is access to a ready market. Adding FAT functionality will cost Microsoft .. how much? All I know, Linux has it for free, sooo ...
Well concidering I have some of the earliest camera phone footage the videos still play on the latest Android phones no problem, so.
@@WATCHINGTHEWATCHERS Of course it will.
There are software formats and hardware formats. Because of Moore Law, the cost of software formats (FAT, NTFS, exFAT, etc.) are diminishing toward zero.
Hardware formats though, have to be manufactured. If for example, nobody manufacture cassette tape player anymore, it will be hard to read what is in it. That's where the need to "refresh" came from.
From my own experience, the data inside my IDE hard drive are still readable after 20 years, but there are no more motherboard that support IDE. Thankfully, the cost of IDE to SATA converter is just a dollar or so.
The cloud for long term backup is a scary idea. Not to mention these clouds does not stays that long and/or will be expensive to keep. Harddisk getting bigger and cheaper still the practical solution.
Eeeh. The bigger the disks gets the more single point of failure they become. And the more space one have the more one collects. Making the problem just bigger. 1TB or even 512GB drivers are replaced with 4TB drives. But Having 4TB on 4 disks running in mirrors (2TB usable) is far better then 8TB on 2 disks. (4TB usable) Not to talk about 8TB drives and bigger. You need to buy so much storage just to get redundancy and it makes no sense when you are trying to keep as little as a 1TB cap on your stuff.
Simply putting more data into a single drive just makes it harder to not put all eggs in to few basket. And the HDD speeds are not improving even now the space is increasing. IF anything big HDD's are making it harder to make real redundancies even now technically they are cheaper per GB. More heads and smaller head tolerances. Asking for stuff to go wrong. ;c
There is no push in making more reliable drives. Just big big cheap. And anyone that cares to spread out copies on multiple drives has to pay to get the lower grade stuff with questionable reliability.
@@TheDiner50 i thought I was finally able to understand what to buy and what not to. But am just getting more confused now. Aaaa. Send help!!!!! I have gazillions of photos and videos, and five 64GB HP pen drives. But they're all full. My laptop's storage is also full. I need more storage. But am confused as to what should I buy. Hard drives? SSDs? CDs? Or just, some more pen drives?!???
@thediner50
Just raid your drives. Look it up.
@@abha1240 I haven't lost a single file in over 30 years of hard drive use. Hard drives will last on average 8 years if they get through the 1st year. I don't push it, so I retire drives when they are 3 to 5 years old, depending on whether the new drives are enough larger and cheap enough for me to purchase. I used to save files on CDs, DVDs, then Blu-rays and memory sticks, but I have too much material now. The only way for me is multiple hard drives. To be extra safe, store extra hard drive backups with friends or relatives as far away as possible, in case of major disaster.
@@abha1240 I'm in very similar situation as you.. I'd like to ask how you solved it?
from the 90's I always backed up every year until my files, videos from tapes, scanned film photos and old digital media from the early 2000's until present now reached 11 terabytes and counting. Hard drives are really reliable with proper storage, i put them to an airtight glass container
There's also another alternative: the Millenniata MDisc "rock disc", supposed to resist 1000 years...
As far as long term media formats, you might have mentioned virtualization. Maybe you can't run the application with the proprietary format natively but you could run it in a VM. VM and other virtualization like containers I suspect will be around for a very long time. In any case, this was a very thorough coverage of backups. Thanks.
Good thing to point out. If that really is ones plan to read data long term. Maybe just maybe keep the software together with your data then. Since it is really fun going around searching for a dead companies software that is 10 years old. Or a alive company that have no reason to help you. Mmm.
Or my favorite one for the last couple of years now. Software requiring internet access to a servers across the ocean. That shutdown 4 years ago. I shit you not there is stuff that you backup and think you got sorted. Just to find out later that on a fresh install system the software you are trying to install needs internet access to access a server for something completely irrelevant but mandatory to work. Dependencies are so fun! And having installers not bundled with all the required stuff like server access and DRM whatever whatever.
If something can not be done offline from scratch you do not have a backup. There is real scenarios where backups where completely useless due to software being incomplete. Braking data that cost allot in upkeep that proved to be unusable...
This was quite timely. Before I migrated to HDD's for backup around 2001 I was burning everything to DVD+ media. I went through those discs today and some of them are 25 years old now. While a few were difficult to read the majority of them were still fine. I last checked them in 2006 and didn't really concern myself with them because everything has been carried along with successive HDD's since then. The discs were highly regarded media back then made by Japanese company TaioYuden? Which was the oem for a lot of upmarket brands back then. You always got what you paid for with DVD media and some were junk within a year.
I once decided to punch software into mylar-backed stainless steel tape. By gum, that stuff would last. The tape held 10 6-bit characters per inch. Assuming the tape was 0.005 inch thick, it would have required 386 cubic feet of tape to hold 1 GB. This was in the1960's. Times change.
You can't even get a usb or sd card with only 1 GB anymore
That’s amazing Bob, what was the software for? As someone who grew up in the age of the internet it is truly amazing what people accomplished with what seems like such small data storage.
@@Calyrekt
The software digitized the locations of little blobs on film. The blobs were images of sparks produced in detectors used in particle physics experiments. The computer was a DEC PDP-1 -- 12K 18-bit words, nominal 100K/200K instructions/second, depending on which instructions. The setup illuminated spots on a CRT, and cast an image of a spot onto exposed/developed film in a movie camera. A photo tube behind the film would set a bit if it saw the spot through clear film, and omit setting the flag if the image of a spark blocked the light from the CRT. The software measured the spark images and recorded their locations on magnetic tape. Other software executed calculations to figure out what happened in the "events" that produced the data. The system processed data from studies conducted at Harvard's Cambridge Electron Accelerator.
The computer used germanium logic, drew about a kilowatt or two, and was painfully unreliable by today's standards. It measured about 20" W x 6' Long x 6' H, plus two six-foot-tall "magtape" drives, plus the desk-sized Type 30 CRT. The CRT's display was 10" x 10", 1K x 1K pixels. Programming language: assembly.
The system was invented by the late Martin Deutsch, who named it SPASS, for SPark chamber Automatic Scanning System. (Yes, he knew the German word Spass...)
(DEC - Digital Equipment Corp.
CRT - cathode ray tube
Magtape - 10" diameter reels, 1/2" tape, 2400 feet, 200 characters/inch)
@@archygrey9093 Yeah! I still have the 128 MB USB thumb drive I purchased from Micro Center in Tustin, CA in 2001 for the bargain price of $39.95! (It still works, BTW, although I don't store anything on it). At the time, it beat those terribly unreliable Iomega Zip drives we were using to store and share files!
@@Calyrekt In the early seventies I was using this tape to provide the ipl (boot)for Burroughs mainframes. Not totally indestructable though, it was pulled through the read head bloody fast using very fine sprocket holes running the lenght of the tape and this would wear.
I've been around so long I have a 1/2" digital tape of work from the early '80s that was created on a Digitial Equipment Corporation VAX11/780 system - way before the PC became ubiquitous. I still have the tape but it's just an artifact these days. It would take a lot to even find a place to read it. The same thing is true for a couple of 8" floppies from a CP/M system in the late '70s.
There are also file formats such as when we used EZ Writer for Word processing in the early '80s which would require that software to be found and loaded (on MS-DOS).
More critical to me are diagrams done in the '90s using Micrografx ABC Flowcharter. I still have that program but it will only run on 32-bit Windows. I have to keep a 32-bit Windows virtual machine to get to that data now.
Yep, I remember those 8-inch floppies well in the Navy and at Bechtel -- and they really were floppy to handle, too! And, yes, I remember ABC Flowcharter, too, which I recall using at JPL.
ABC Flowcharter.. What a memory, and what a fine piece of software that was
Spinning rust at the moment is still the best at the moment as long as you spin the dive up and access every now and then. I have ide drives that are all but 20 years old and the data is good, and I'm glad you agree.
My miniscribe mfm drive from 1987 are still working and have no bad sectors. 😁
@@brostenen thanks for the reply and it's nice to prove to some idiot that thinks we are all morons that it's not possible and that rot, wear etc kill the data and drive..👍
@@kevinkirkby1484 Well.... The drive is a rarity. 90 percent of miniscribe drives died back then. 😉😁 But yeah. Spinning platter drives or tape streamers are the best storage for long term data saving. Eventually everything will fail. Even the casettes that I have for my Commodore64 machines. Early floppy disks are the most reliable of floppy disks. Here I am thinking about 3.5 inch 3M disks from around 1987 to 1993. The Sony, verbatim and others that I have, are starting to fail. Only early 3M before they were branded Imation, are still error free. At least the ones that I am using for my Amiga's.
@@brostenen the old floppy, those where the days, as for the commodore, back then couldn't afford one but did have the old spectrum for home but where I worked we had an old mainframe with tape reels it was like being in a Bond movie and was used for accounting etc. A second hand 486 was my first real forea into the pc of today, some many £1000s of pounds and years later now they're just tools to use. Thank god spinning rust got cheaper.. The oldest drive I have now and it's been kept as a momento is an 80gb ide.. one day I might buy the adaptor just for the fun of it to see what happened to it.. that was from 1996..👍
@@kevinkirkby1484 Yup. I was able to look into the computer/mainframe room on my mothers work place around 1987 or something. She worked with drawing transformer stations and high voltage power lines. Those spinning tape reel's were something to behold.
Personally I worked and saved up for my first computer in 1993. It was a Cyrix 486 slc2 50 megaherz. ET4000 gfx, Sound Galaxy soundcard and 120 megabyte harddisk. And of course 4 megabyte Ram.
My parents bought an Unisys PW/2 Series 300 workstation in 1987. It was a 286 8/10 megaherz, EGA gfx, 640kb Ram and 20 megabyte harddrive. The most mind blowing was an optical mouse that needed a special metal plate as mouse pad.
My friends and family members all went with Commodore. Cusin had a C64 in 1984-ish and my friends used Amiga500 from around late 1987 or early 1988.
Just strange how things have evolved, some kind of ride, and I am happy and gratefull that I have been able to be on the ride. I remember all the social stuff around C64 and Amiga. Something that are let out today, when we see youtube videoes about old computers. I mean. A young person the age of 25, talking about Amiga today, can not know how we actually used Amiga's back then. It was like totally different back then.
Hard drives fail as well so I make a back up of the back up. This has saved my butt multiple times. I always keep two back up drive are identical.
Agreed on all points! I do think SSD could be a good backup medium for the coming 10-20 years. There's always an external enclosure you can buy to get it to work on the current connection technology. Even hard drives from 20-30 years ago can be accessed. With emulators and abandon ware software archives you can access a lot of old file formats, and if you're a developer you can create your own converter or even a floppy capture device as I have done. I've still got the first basic program I saved to tape as a kid, 99.8% of all floppy data from MSX, Amiga and PC era. One of the most important things is that you look after your data by always having multiple checked copies, in different physical locations at least 10km apart and move your data to fresh new media every 3-5 years. Available connection types and media will migrate at the same time. I went the same way from tape to floppy, to hard disk and plan to go to ssd soon. I don't like my data in the cloud though, doesn't feel right with some personal sensitive data. I own 6 SSDs over 10+ years and none have failed so far, wear level not even scratching 20%. It's also worth noting to have offline backups as well, to protect against viruses, ransomware and other data theft. The only thing you can be sure to last is pornography leaked to the internet, that will remain in this world indefinitely ;)
Ssd degrade when stored offline if temps are high, like 30-40C. They are rated for 1 year max, by Jedec.
So don't rely on them for three years, unless every year you read them once fully, to allow drivebto refresh weak cells.
@@nilsfrahm1323 never heard about that before. Many ssds run at 30-40 degrees in the computer case so that would mean many ssds are at risk. Do you have a reference to the source material describing this issue?
@@imqqmi I would say 30-40C is low. But temperatures do effect how long the data is safe. The mitigating factore here is that data on the SSD is often re-written when in a PC. With a decent drive, at not silly temperatures, you should have nothing to worry about.
What do you mean by move your data to new media? And also how does one rewrite the data?
@@ombhamare522 newly bought storage device, a harddisk, ssd etc. Ssds are often smart enough to refresh the data periodically, or if you wish to force it, wipe a second drive, clone the data and use the second drive as primary. Repeat the process every year or so.
I believe for documents and stuff, Archives take a photo (microfiche), film negatives. For two reasons; the materials that modern polyester film stock is made of will last like 100 years; also if Civilization collapses and person can hold a negative up to the sun and see what's on it. But may not be able to access a disk.
Excellent point. For any solution to work, you not only need a long-lasting format; you’ll also need equipment to read it.
Excellent video - thanks! I’ve been wondering for a long time if digitally stored info, photos, videos, etc will be accessible in the future. Need to have backup copies elsewhere besides one’s home in case disaster. Cloud storage, bank vault, maybe with family members, water tight storage container in ground are just a few ideas. Also, besides we, the original owners, who will even care when we are gone? Many of the younger generation could care less as they are focused on the here & now. Some older folk don’t care either. Yet many people hunger to learn about their ancestors.
Excellent discussion, I have been using a somewhat similar strategy I call "laddering" .. just like people who buy Certificates of deposit in "staggered fashion" where they get the five year interest rate, yet individual CD's mature every year .. or even every month giving continual access to funds .. yet, they are all five year CD's getting the highest interest. I stagger my transfer of data, photos and videos, where the oldest, likely one to two years, gets re-written to the latest technology and is then refreshed. I save the older original just in case I later notice a transcription error .. which hasn't yet happened. I have everything on HDD and also on quality SSD in this fashion and the 2.5" device archive slowly grows in size .. manageable size.
I have had hardrives for 10 years with no problems. One tip is to only fill the drive to about 80%.
the problem is when you start having to back up terabytes of data. Each back up takes a ton of space.
All my cheap DVDs I've burned more than a decade ago are fully readable without even slowdowns.. BluRays should be even more reliable since they use inorganic layer (except the mistake which LTH is) so optical is my first choice for backup to this day - it stood the test of time 😀
I have programs on 3.5 floppies (from the manufacturer) that is still working.😂
For DVDs and all recordable optical discs, storage environment is critical. They can be ruined by just a few weeks of exposure to sunlight, so keeping them in the dark, and at normal room temperature or slightly cooler, is necessary.
@@marianneoelund2940 You may think I'm joking but last summer I was moving and I forgot two at least decade old dual layer DVDs (one of the cheapest brands at the time - Ridata) in my car glove box for the whole summer. At the end of the summer I realized my mistake and tried to copy them. To my surprise both read perfectly. Keep in mind the temps around here are hitting 40°C during the summer and in the car was much hotter due to heat accumulation. Yes, good storing conditions are ideal but sometimes you may get lucky even with cheap discs (mostly depends on the individual disc quality).
i started doing backups of photos back when digital cameras were 640x480, on CD-Rs, then eventually on DVD-R when they became available. they're all very much readable in 2023, just checked them recently.
Same here. I have tons of CD/DVDs from the early 2000's (15-20 years old) and I've yet to find one that is unreadable. I haven't had them out in the sun, but they have certainly not been taken care of beyond the protection a drawer offers.
I have always thought of my digital presence and my presence in this world as a whole as a transient thing, that I should strive to leave as little behind as possible but as I grow older I start thinking of the old adage about "planting trees under whose shade you will never sit". This has given me something to think about.
Good advice, I have hard drives in multiple locations, also DVD & Blu-Ray backups plus major holiday photos printed as coffee table books which are also stored in the cloud by the printer company in case another copy needs to be ordered ... I have to admit most people don't have any back ups at all 😳
Funny enough, a few weeks ago I pulled out my floppies from 1986 (5.25 inches) C64 and all the data is still there. They were stored in the garage, so no heating, and at the same place I also kept my 3.5 inches floppies (Amiga) from 1989, and the same thing, no data loss at all. Yes, true, those are not HD, so little ticker track, only 880K, but still... it is there!
I still have an Amiga 2000HD and 4000 still operational as well as an Apple II GS. Much of the amiga files and disks still work. The 5 1/4’ floppies for the apple are not all working anymore but most still do
This is a thought that I have kept coming back to throughout the years as I think back to how technology and storage media have changed precipitously even within the last decade. Thank you for addressing them and I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion… diverse mediums and multiple backups are the only insurance policy. We don’t often think about catastrophic events that lead to data loss but it’s always within the realm of possibility. 😬
If paper burns in a fire, your digital media is almost certainly gone too. The disadvantage of paper is it’s difficult to back up offsite in multiple places if you have a lot of data.
The only problem I have with HDDs are them being fragile.
Surprisingly enough, their physical size isn't an issue for me...
actually, hard drives are not that fragile when turned off, assuming you dont drop them on the floor. The heads are parked and can take quite a bumb without issue.
@@nilsfrahm1323well that's good to know
How about M-disks ? They should last for 1000 years. I saw a movie where they put an M-disk in boiling water and in ice and it was still readable.
M-Disc tech is dope. They are able to be so reliable because they actually etch the data in the plastic, which won't degrade easily like regular optical media
I just bought M-disk. I’ve had good look with hard drive backups though. but years ago at a jobsite. We had developed bad data on some sectors. When I went back to my archives, turns out,,the corrupted data had been copied on backups. I had to go back about one year old archives to get good data although some new data was missing. Drive had been overused, but I learned my lesson.
Good luck finding a drive that can read this disks in 10 or even 20 years from now. Most fairly new pcs today already don't have an optical drive anymore.
Torsten Johann mine is USB /portable drive
The very fact that M-disks were not mentioned kinda moots part of this discussion.
I have over 10 very unorganized external harddrive. I've started to organize my data better on new drives since 2016.
One of the things that I do is to generate md5 checksums for the files that I've stored, and I will periodically verify the checksums. when a disk started to fail some files failed to checksum correctly so I was able to retired that computer (it was in-home webserver), but my data is backed up (I have duplicates on other disk drives and 2 unique sets of DVDs storing the same data). Having worked at a company that did backup software back in the 1990s, I know horror stories that customers encountered that got them to get a commercial product.
Like him, I also did backup from CD R, move to DVD R, since I thought it's more resistant than HDD (in my mind, it can't be corrupted / infected with virus), but after reading somewhere else that Optical actually detoriate faster than HDD, and the trouble of spanning multiple DVDs I moved to HDD as well.
I use archive-grade optical media and magnetic tape.
I am surprised magnetic tapes were not mentioned , eventoday this is the BEST and most durable media for archival purposes. the only downside would be the hardware device in the future, as companies keep increasing tape sizes and changing physical size so its the only risky part, maybe next year you will not find any ultrium device with support for DLT or any affordable DTA reader , even today the reader alone costs a lot. but strictly speaking of the media, I do believe it is still the most durable.
Don't be on SSDs for long-term storage. After a 13 month old 1/2 TB external SSD failed (one month after warranty expiration, of course) I contacted a professional data recovery company, with an expectation that I could recover the data, but that that recovery might be quite expensive. They had a minimum recovery fee of about $250 and said their fees could run into the thousands of dollars. Getting the estimate was free, however. But, after shipping the SSD to them, they told me there was nothing they could do, regardless of how much money I might be willing to pay. They further told me that in their experience, SSDs were no more reliable than standard disk drives, and have a failure rate that was about the same.
Buying an SSD is confusing, you have to look at the actual specs. QLCs are the first to go (only lasting a few thousands write cycles at BEST), while TLCs will lasts somewhat longer (3000 to 5000 or so cycles), MLC next in line to blow, clocking in at 10k to 30k cycles. Finally SLC is the "best of the breed" and will lasts 50k cycles at the LEAST. Some will even goes strong for 100k cycles!
What I would do? I would get used MLCs/SLCs depending on the price and ENTERPRISE grade with QUALITY features (ECC, power protection, etc) that still makes the grade. Will costs you as much as a brand stinking QLC/TLC disk but will lasts as long if not longer and be more reliable to boot (so the controller will be less likely to fry, to have temp issues, etc).
@@rickytorres9089
Where does wd blue ssd stand?
Have u tried some of these youtube repair channel? They seem legit knowledgeable. Not this channel tho. A
Older SSDs were based on SLC or MLC, so they would last for significantly much longer than the TLC or QLC SSDs of today. Nowadays, please just use HDD for long term storage
@@RonLarhz SSD should not be considered as legitimate storage but rather hardware booster. When the controller chip fried, the data is gone for good.
As for HDD, partial data recovery may be done by removing the faulty disc/header and rescuring those intact files.
Anyway the best/cost effective storage for home users may by copying files to HDDs and then disconnect them from power source.
My answer would be...multiple. Just copy everything irreplaceable into at least 3 locations and different types of storage/backup. The more spread out and diversified the better. All forms of storage can fail, even storing something in a self-storage warehouse, with an iron-mountain style archiving company, or a bank vault, all can fail.
You really need some form of open source filesystem that can scan for and scrub bitflips using a combination of duplicate data and checksums (or some better ecc check).
Open source is critical for the long term, keeping in mind that you also need to store copies of the source (It can even be lazer printed if not too bloated, its just text after all).
Many companies have gone out of business leaving customers with unuseable software and no support decades later.
Simply saving multiple copies (minimum 3) can fill this role to some degree, but you still need to compare them against each other on a scheduled basis, every couple of years.
It also helps to make hashes of chunks of data(smaller chunks are better) to help identify which copy has the flaw when a scan shows they don't match anymore. The 3rd copy can be used to confirm exactly which bits have changed.
That is Really HELPFUL and definitely THOUGHT-PROVOKING, Indeed.
Thanks for all the efforts and kindness Sir.
One free option is to open a special e-mail account. A paragraph or two can be written to add some dimension to the photographs which can be added as an attachment. Then go to that account and archive the e-mail.
I was using M-Disc for a while for family videos, but its getting difficult to get M-disc media now. I also keep backups on HDs as well.
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is the way to go if you want to throw the media in a safe for 30 years. Maybe not too practical for the average consumer though.
They will stoo making the drives to read LTO tapes
@@rty1955 That's one of the big issues with tape backup. I remember reading a story of the Grim Fandango remaster, and they backed their source code on obsolete tapes. They almost didn't have a way of reading them until they stumbled across a drive in a storage unit.
You can ALSO use a utility like parchive to create parity files that will help restore the original files if they go south and YOU decide what percentage to use.
Store the original file on one and the p-files on another. It lessens the concerns but there are still a chance of loss.
Very interesting, I always save my data on Floppy Discs, CD Rom, USB stick, SD Card, A plug in Hard Drive and the Computers SSD D Drive. When I change something on any file it gets saved on all six formats, I doubt all six are going to fail at the same time.
The suck part about moving paper to digital are the ridiculous government entities that require a paper document with a seal or raised seal for it to be official, such as VA documents, birth records, or even medical documents that have not gone digital. In most cases that I have experienced different doctors offices that cannot read a disk from somewhere else. I for one am sick of the paper, no paper storage. I have a handful of thumbdrives and just recently obtained a new laptop. After watching a video you posted, I removed an old hard drive AND the dvd player, bought the cases and now have external both. All these years, I protested against the new stuff not knowing I could remove my old dvd player and still use. I came from the old tower generation, easy to tear apart and rebuild and never endeavored to the insides of a laptop. Lol. Thanks for teaching an old dawg new tricks.
You mention that paper is flammable, but I think it is also important to mention that hard drives (external or internal) are mechanical devices and, as such, are suspectible to mechanical damage. Drop one on the floor and you might have to spend a considerable amount of money to fix it and/or restore the information on it. SSD drives are also not completely safe from common mechanical damage, such as being dropped.
I keep my archives on two mediums - an external hard drive and an SSD drive.
My history as an old geek :
the more reliable storage I had tested :
1-Cassettes, I have cassettes from the early 80s (ZX Spectrum, C64) still working perfectly for nearly 9/10.
2-5.25 floppy disks, 7/10 still working
3-HDD drive, 6/10 and also incompatible formats or hardware protocols/connectors (RLL, MFM, early IDE, early SCSI ...).
3-USB sticks / memory cards 5-6/10 and also about memory cards, the problem of old formats (Memorystick, Smartmedia, CFI/II, ...)
4-3.5 floppy 4/10
5-CD, DVD, ... less than 3/10
The best system is punched tapes, even after 3/4 of a century, almost 100% are still readable but I never used it and who still needs it ?
I don't know yet about SSD but till now seem quite reliable.
About cloud storage, what if your supplier go bankrupt ?
The best option for important data is multiple copies, and ideally at least one on a offline storage.
This is of course for long term storage/reliability, for years.
I'd say, for USB sticks there should be a rule "the older it is, the longer it will work" written somewhere. I've got a 2GB 20 years old USB stick which still works, and I've got a dozen of 32+GB USB3 thumb drives dead after 1 just year of usage. Sometimes even less.
@@OlegLecinsky Indeed but it's always the same when a tech appears, often this tech is in competition with established standards, is more expensive and less compatible (as quite new) and customers must be convinced, therefore the companies make those new devices as reliable as possible, when it's became the standard, and the prices have drastically decrease, which companies still care about reliability, the only goal is maximizing profit and to maximize profit, the easiest way is quality shortcuts
It's why a 1977 8" 120Ko floppy disk is more reliable than a 1993 3.5" 1.44 disk, or a 2001 8MB Smartmedia card is more reliable than a 2023 SDXC, because the 1977 floppy costed more than a box of10x 3.5" or the SM card because it costed more than the camera it was made for.
Most all of the deficiencies you mentioned for paper also exist for all the other digital media you mentioned. Original copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist and are readable. Hard disks will likely have rusted to dust in the same time frame.
Oh, good! I use external HDs - the same drives you put in your computer. I use HD docks, and it works great.
I'm still a fan of film photography and some of the most precious historical (photographic) images were the old methods. There are photographic prints and negatives still in existence that are over 130 years old. If stored correctly, I'm guessing they could last even longer. Fire and flood notwithstanding....
Dig a whole and put the physical pics in a container and berry it.
Convert the data into binary and carve it on stones 😂
@@MohsinExperiments Great idea but it would need to be small and even at a pin prick scale it would reach to the moon and back just for one 1gig of information.
ZFS boys and girls, ZFS. A nice RaidZ3 setup with auto snapshotting, and auto backup of snapshots to a backup server, that is powered up once a month to take those backups, with that server being powered down the rest of the time. You're pretty golden.
The best option is a USB external hard drive for the typical home user. When it comes to companies then I would suggest an off-site backup and restore company.
No... Never let another company handle your data, if you are a big company. Do it in house, but set up a mirror drive, spanning different locations. Years ago, it was called i-scsi. But always in house, because if your data is extremely valuable, you need to eliminate someone else doing it for you.
No way!!! People, don't do it. I used an external hard drive and it failed. It was very difficult to realize that I'd lost so many photos. From now on, I print the photos.
@@irmasanchez5274things I printed 20 years ago are getting too fragile to handle. Be sure to print on archive quality paper and with "ink that won't fade away.
If you can stomach the upfront cost of a LTO Tape machine and like 5-20 tapes. Maybe LTO 4-6 is a good starting point. Then use Veeam community. Then just back up the whole PC, NAS... Make a few full backup tapes with no compression. Remember the encryption key and you are good to go. As a Home user I feel safe to have tape cover the "everything digital" and make an annually backup each one is safe for 30 years since they date it was written.
I have never slept so sound.
I have my data stored in all my computers, hard drives, USB thumb drives, external SSD. It doesn't hurt to have redundant storage. I also have emulators such as Amiga Forever to read long gone formats.
For our family photos I currently keep them stored on a Synology NAS with 2 drive fault protection. I have that backed up to another Synology NAS at our business. Then I have them backed up to Crashplan and Backblaze B2. I am contemplating making a copy on RDX tape or Optical Discs. Part of me wonders if my kids and their kids will appreciate me doing all of this, but It makes me happy. :)
Likely your kids, kids my not comprehend the effort you place in the backups you make.
On cd's and DVD's - wauw what a job. I do have a big box on the attic with 300+ DAT tapes...if anyone wants them... I do have 10 (1 or 2 TB) external HD's. And dropped a few and they died. I did also keep the HD's from old computers, 300GB, 500GB, 2TB.Actually they all still work. (And I did not drop them...) The nice thing is, they only run when I connect them - for the rest they are nicely stored in the drawer. Thanks for the video!
Hard Disks for long term storage? Possibly they last a very long time if they are used and then stored, but spinning hard drives in a computer will sometimes crash. Usually not a question of if it will crash as when will it will crash. I have had a number of Hard Disks crash and they usually aren't accessible any more, unless you pay expensive recovery fees, with doubtful results. Hard Disks are reliable for the most part, but I would never rely on them for truly long term storage. I have had some that have lasted for years; others that crashed within a year or so. The cloud is the way to go, along with at least one or two other backups, one of which should be stored offsite.
"The cloud is the way to go"
That's just someone else's hard drives. They also crash. However, using Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) nearly eliminates data loss in that scenario.
You don't use the same hdd for everyday use as well as long term storage.
@@thomasmaughan4798 Cloud may be more reliable because hdds can be replicated, multiple copies, backups in multiple data centers and they monitor daily the smart data from the hdds. Also temperature control is a plus. While a user may not check smart info, may seldom turn on the hdd, which may cause problems due to motor spinning up, straining the electronics.
@@nilsfrahm1323 "Cloud may be more reliable"
I notice the word "might". Indeed, this cloud might be more reliable than that one; and the path between you and the cloud might be reliable, maybe not. It also depends on the user's own expertise in such matters. As I have multiple RAID5 NAS's and external USB spindisks I am pretty well protected and do not depend on the internet to reach my stuff. I do not trust SSD for anything other than transport.
@@thomasmaughan4798 Nas can be vulnerable to power surge, software errors in filesystem, ransomware, virus in network. Hdd inside may be all same brand or same batch, making a defect in that batch a point of failure. Flooding, eathquakes, thieves can affect a region, if all nas are in same region, your data is lost. Also government may come and seize your hardware in case of suspicion you did something wrong. Cloud data may protect you from that. Internet access may be down for brief period, but in a few weeks you can get your data back. Even if internet is blocked in your country, you may ask a friend in other country to save a snapshot of your data.
So it's good to have alternatives, as no single method is perfect.
I use a raid array that I copy files to from my other computers. Redundant backup with parity! I still copy the contents of the array to an extenal drives at intervals.
I've been in the IT field since 1980 and all media has its limitations, but that said -- when I started we used Reel to Reel tape for everything we backed up (even the 20 Meg super sized removable platters in the mini-car size disk drives (joke!)).
The above being said, what I have had the best luck storing data on was Dat Tape, I've had backups that I could read 20+ years later with an old SCSI or USB Dat drive -- I know most folks think that's funny !
Leo's right about one thing, you want to keep that information really long term, keep it migrating to new media. But If I want something that I can just put away and forget for a few years, its going to be put on tape and stored in a cool dry place.
Thanks for the video! Glad someone else thinks about this as much as I do. You validated the way I was thinking about this subject. Thanks to the comments below who mentioned the PDF/A - Archival and looking up what the Smithonian Uses for digital information- I will look into these items too.
hard drives fired up once a year are best, the rest of the time they can stay on a shelf !
a trick with flash memory/ssd's is to make the back up when they are warm, this improves the noise margin
It doesn't really matter which you choose. But you have to have a means of accessing data on that media. We've been fortunate for 40+ years that most media is accessible on a current desktop computer, exceptions include SCSIbased media and external/internal tape. I still have a W2K 1999 working computer for accessing all my data, 2940scsi included.
Wise words, brother. People should listen to what you're saying. You're thinking ahead.
Going on 9 years on a 4 bay raid 5 system. I have replaced the drives when bad sectors are reported and the. Software rebuilds the new drive into the array. I always use WD enterprise gold drives.
A backup disk left attached to the computer is a good idea. There are programs that back up to it daily, or continuously. In addition to this disk, I recommend 3 others that are attached once a month (in rotation), backed up, and then stored in plastic boxes with desiccant packages. Store in a cool, dry place.
I use cloud storage for data that is not sensitive. That I wouldn't care if someone hacked. Some people here oppose cloud servers. I get that, but I have tons of stuff that I couldn't care less if you hacked, such as physics papers. I doubt the cloud server will be hacked, but even if it is, you will not lose the data. They will restore a backup.
I just bought two renewed 18tb hdd’s from Amazon to backup all of my very important data.
I use the same logic you use. Many backups in different places and the cloud just because I can access my data from anywhere in the world.😀
Actually quite satisfying hearing this from someone with some experience, so thank you!
I rsync my data every night to TWO local hard drives, and then remotely to a drive/computer located in a different town far away from my home in case of unforeseen natural disasters.
The most robust media is Magneto-optical disc or MO-disc. It is resistant to light and magnetic field. 1.3GB 3.5in disc is the biggest and latest that you can easily find media and drive. Another robust media is 50nm SLC flash, the biggest common one is intel X25-E 64GB 2.5in SATA drive. A lightly used one stored in cool environment should last decades.
Trusting the cloud is like handing your expensive camera to a stranger to take a picture and hoping he doesnt just run away.
Freeze seal in plastic sealer bag all the disc and any other small external hard drive, flash drives etc
I have two external hdd and then I used the windows disc manager to make them RAID 1. Should be ok as time to time we can check if one of them needs replacement. So far working well!
File formats, I've got a load of stuff in the old lotus file formats. MS dropped support for that a while back, luckily I 1) don't really need it and 2) libre office will still open it. The enough copies thing is very important I know a few people who lost everything because they had one backup. Heck I've twice had 2 simultaneous disk fails, luckily there were other backups.
In regards of CD's & DVD's 1:14 store them where no light & air hits their surfaces.
While not really addressing the point of the video, I find that with the periodic OS upgrades imposed on us by Microsoft and Apple, we tend to upgrade the hardware and its backups every few years for most folks, maybe 6 to 10 years for me. As a result, I do not have any "old media" in use. For example, When I was deep into OS/2 in the 1980s and 90s, I used 3.5" floppies for storage. When compatibility problems forced me to move to XP, I had to selectively move my programs and data to the new OS, and switched to CD storage for the larger volumes required by newer programs. Yes, I still have an XP machine with a 3.5" and 5" floppy drive, just in case some blast from the past shows up. (I do not know if those old floppy drives are still supported in Win-10.) I toy with the idea of clearing the XP machine and reloading OS/2 to play with. It really was a decade ahead Windows in terms of lack of system loading, operational speed, and easy to fine tune to one's needs, but IBM never supported its expansion beyond IBM's needs, which was an OS which could easily interface with its commercial mainframe systems.
storing anything that is electronic in nature is also subject to HOW you store something - like is the humidity controlled, temperature controlled, etc, as much as the quality of what you stored..
For example, electronics that are left in a moist environment can and sometimes do become excessively corroded. Those little flash thumb drives -- yep. Hard drives - perhaps. One place many will choose thoughtlessly to store such media - well, a FIREPROOF safe, of course. Well, in a fireproof safe, often the material lining such safes has a high moisture content - and can cause high humidity within the safe themselves. How do I know ? Well, I used to save passwords at work- which means a well ventilated/air conditioned space - and after about 6 months, the thumb drives no longer functioned; tore the drives apart, and it was just a corroded green mess under.
Maybe storing them in vacuum sealed bags might have worked; maybe buying higher quality thumb drives might have worked. I don't know. Just beware that a fireproof safe while it brings some protections, it introduces other potential issues. Same thing with storing things in basements, or attics.. Or when you have movers that pack up your hard drives with your memories as well.
M-Disc. Plus a copy of important documents in plain old ASCII text in addition to original both stored on the M-Disc.
I had two same external HDD from western digital, not use them much, maybe once in month, and they stop working in about 5 years. Also old laptop integrated HDD stop working, but in 10 years, not sure was it westernd digital.
M discs are what I'm relying on long term, but I still use Hard drives as well.
Interesting dialogue on the formats.... made me think about "Streaming Formats" Thanks Leo! You got a new subscriber!
I feel best way to store things is to compress them as much as possible then store them everywhere HDDs and free cloud, that's the best way to go about it cost effectively, otherwise you have to have a server like database with raid and keep throwing out the old hard drives
I'm one step ahead, I keep my files on two HDD disks. With a cloning device, independent of a computer with single button operation, to keep back ups quick and convenient.
I already lost all information in a “backup” internal SSD.
Fortunately the original information in mechanical disk saved the situation.
Thank you very much.
For long time i use HDD for my backup and store data for very much over 14years.
“If the data is only in one place, it’s not backed up.” 💯
I see many people talking about formats and number of backups......people seem to forget the connectivity issue. 20 years from now you may have data on DVD or Hard drive but you may not have SATA connection anymore. I already went through this once when I had to connect IDE drive to my SATA mobo.
So dont worry about your hard drive lasting.......worry about sata lasting....once M2 becomes the norm, you will have problem finding hardware to run your old hard drive.
There remains a solution for IDE - there are USB external IDE connectors, for example. I expect the same for SATA for a very long time as well. But the point is well taken - that's why I recommend copying to current technology, whatever it may be, periodically.
1) Have your own operating system. Include the source code, compiler and compiler's compiler.
2) Have a universal reader and backup software with a source that you can compile. Which means that you have to have a compiler and a compiler's compiler.
3) A reliable hard disk and external drive for periodic auto backup. There are problems with the motherboard.
4) Your present system must be able to save data in the old format.
5) I've already lost much data on CD. I cannot retrieve any data because the CD is practically blank and my CD drive is reading my CDs endlessly.
6) If everything is lost, I hope you have the energy and time to type the source codes, recompile them and rebuild your data with OCR if you still have your data on scannable material.
7) What is needed is a system (with ports for flash drives and drives for floppies, 1.44, zip disks, CDs and DVDs) and storage media that are dedicated to store data for many many years.
Always think worst case scenario. I have my most coveted files backed up on physical devices and in the cloud. When you reach the level of paranoia that I have you know that, well, server farms can burn down and take your data with it. To combat this, I have given a relative that I trust an external drive containing files that I must have in case one of these nightmare scenarios come to fruition.
if you store your CDs/DVDs in a dark room with controlled environment (temperature & humidity), they'll last easily for over 30-35 years. some of my CDs and DVDs are more than 25 years and they still work flawlessly. I trust less hard disks for long term backups since they're mechanical... so I change them every 8-10 years.
I met an audio Engineer who taught me how to backup files to DVDs. Rule 1: Don't write at high speed so as to reduce Writting errors. 2: Don't write more than 65% of the maximum capacity.
3: store it properly
4: have multiple copies of the same content.
There are magnetic tape cartridges that can store hundreds of terabytes of data or even more.
I still had some 25 year old IDE HDDs. I picked up an inexpensive IDE to USB enclosure and migrated everything I wanted to keep to a 4Tb USB HDD. In another 25 years I'll migrate everything important off of it to the lastest 500Tb USB HDD. That's how I've always held on to my old data.
I do agree that hard drives are the best way, also in my opinion, the best long term storage media are using hash codes, generate a hash from the files, if even a bit is changed, you'll know it, so you can store the data on two different medias, that's more important, knowing if the file gets corrupted is more important than the media itself
You need at least one copy on hard drive on another location to be safe from fire, flooding, earthquake and so on. I prefer 3,5" HDD over 2,5" HDD as data uses more physical space on the drive
About formats made me think about my dad, he loves and stores a lot of stuff in a program called lotus calendar
he still uses it in a virtual machine because so much contact info, birthdays, notes and other stuff he built up over the years is stored in it
the company that makes it is still around but has moved to a 'cloud native pay your soul blablabla' operation style still lacking the stuff he uses so he never switched...
it's good to consider that kind of stuff as well and i almost forgot about it
We really need to be careful with things that are (currently) ubiquitous.....so was VHS, 8 track tapes, etc. and the list goes on.
I am 'comfortable with paper'. I have the complete works of Shakespeare with critical essays and illustrative plates in a single book from the 1890's. Beautifully bound and still readable ha ha as he said. There's something about paper. For some research documents I have been writing I have included the data files in appendices in 4 point font and printing an archive for a filing cabinet. The 11 point and 4 point fonts are readable by a scanner. I will never need it but there is something about paper...
The best long-term storage is Blu-ray high capacities vacuum sealed and put into sleeves and then stored in a cool dry place.i have cds from 1990 that are in perfect pristine condition and are still 1000% readable
LTO tapes... which is magnetic tape, but each can store about 12TB and lasts ca 10 years.