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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable

This is important, and for some media, it should be more often than that.

People forget that flash memory uses electrical charge to store data. It's not durable. If left unpowered for too long, that data will get corrupted. A failure might not even be visible without examining every bit of every file.

Keep backups. Include recovery data (e.g. PAR2). Store them on multiple media. Keep them well-maintained (e.g. give flash drives power). Mind their environment. Copy them to new storage devices before the old ones become obsolete.

It's funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

It's funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Sophistication often creates fragility. The human mind marvels at sophistication naturally; appreciation for resilience usually only comes after that fragile thing has broken. Of course it's too late by then.

All them young whipper snappers will continue to learn these life lessons the hard way, it seems.

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