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#11
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
William Brown wrote:
On Tue, 10 May 2011 11:33:43 -0400, JW wrote: After reading about the (not so) longevity of using CD-R and DVD-R as archival media I decided to get two 2TB Hitachi drives from Newegg keeping them mirrored in case one dies. As I was moving the data from the optical media to the fixed disks, about 10 of 350 or so optical discs I had gave me fits (CRC errors, bad blocks, etc.) I was able to recover 8 of them and 2 were a complete loss. (Note that I always used verify after burning to make sure the discs were good.) Then I came across this: http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/...k_warning.html So, do I still need to worry, or is that bull****? Perhaps I need to look for a utility that "refreshes" the data by reading and writing the data back to disk? I have an old Engineer friend who used to work for Quantum a number of years ago and his response was "Depends on the media but yes, it can lose data if power off for a very long time and if subjected to magnetic interference." Of course being more than 10 years ago, things have possibly changed... Thanks. No just use Gold 100 year archival CD/DVD the DVD's are only rated at 80 years, there some 4-5 firms that make them or Cased DVD RAM 100 year life span. CD/DVD in whatever version are unsuitable for archiving, unless you do extensive evaluation on a specific burner+media combination and have a binding assurance from the media vendor that they will not change the media characteristics. Even with that, 100 years is completely fictional under real conditions. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans |
#12
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
On 11 May 2011 12:00:20 GMT Arno wrote in Message id:
: William Brown wrote: On Tue, 10 May 2011 11:33:43 -0400, JW wrote: After reading about the (not so) longevity of using CD-R and DVD-R as archival media I decided to get two 2TB Hitachi drives from Newegg keeping them mirrored in case one dies. As I was moving the data from the optical media to the fixed disks, about 10 of 350 or so optical discs I had gave me fits (CRC errors, bad blocks, etc.) I was able to recover 8 of them and 2 were a complete loss. (Note that I always used verify after burning to make sure the discs were good.) Then I came across this: http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/...k_warning.html So, do I still need to worry, or is that bull****? Perhaps I need to look for a utility that "refreshes" the data by reading and writing the data back to disk? I have an old Engineer friend who used to work for Quantum a number of years ago and his response was "Depends on the media but yes, it can lose data if power off for a very long time and if subjected to magnetic interference." Of course being more than 10 years ago, things have possibly changed... Thanks. No just use Gold 100 year archival CD/DVD the DVD's are only rated at 80 years, there some 4-5 firms that make them or Cased DVD RAM 100 year life span. CD/DVD in whatever version are unsuitable for archiving, unless you do extensive evaluation on a specific burner+media combination and have a binding assurance from the media vendor that they will not change the media characteristics. Even with that, 100 years is completely fictional under real conditions. Additionally, having the data on DVD and CD-R media was becoming a real hassle anyway when I needed to access it. I think I will go with the advice of using 3 drives, and keeping one of them offsite. I'll also schedule long SMART tests. Would Hitachi's DFT be the correct tool http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/#DFT Or is there a third party tool that is better or recommended? Thanks to all for your suggestions. |
#13
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
On May 11, 2:34*pm, JW wrote:
On 11 May 2011 12:00:20 GMT Arno wrote in Message id: : William Brown wrote: On Tue, 10 May 2011 11:33:43 -0400, JW wrote: After reading about the (not so) longevity of using CD-R and DVD-R as archival media I decided to get two 2TB Hitachi drives from Newegg keeping them mirrored in case one dies. As I was moving the data from the optical media to the fixed disks, about 10 of 350 or so optical discs I had gave me fits (CRC errors, bad blocks, etc.) I was able to recover 8 of them and 2 were a complete loss. (Note that I always used verify after burning to make sure the discs were good.) Then I came across this: http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/...k_warning.html So, do I still need to worry, or is that bull****? Perhaps I need to look for a utility that "refreshes" the data by reading and writing the data back to disk? I have an old Engineer friend who used to work for Quantum a number of years ago and his response was "Depends on the media but yes, it can lose data if power off for a very long time and if subjected to magnetic interference." Of course being more than 10 years ago, things have possibly changed... Thanks. No just use Gold 100 year archival CD/DVD *the DVD's are only rated at 80 years, there some 4-5 firms that make them or Cased *DVD RAM 100 year life span. CD/DVD in whatever version are unsuitable for archiving, unless you do extensive evaluation on a specific burner+media combination and have a binding assurance from the media vendor that they will not change the media characteristics. Even with that, 100 years is completely fictional under real conditions. Additionally, having the data on DVD and CD-R media was becoming a real hassle anyway when I needed to access it. I think I will go with the advice of using 3 drives, and keeping one of them offsite. I'll also schedule long SMART tests. Would Hitachi's DFT be the correct toolhttp://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/#DFT Or is there a third party tool that is better or recommended? Thanks to all for your suggestions. As well as drives - consider online storage as PART of your backup scheme. |
#14
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
On 5/10/2011 8:23 PM, Arno wrote:
Ed wrote: On 5/10/2011 2:26 PM, Arno wrote: Depending on your local customs, you might be able to rent a safe deposit box cheaply. I have one of my USB backup drives in a safe deposit box. I take it out once a month and update the backups. .... What do you pay for the box? Here in Swizerland it is something like 100EUR/USD per year for a standard-sized box that can take two external 3.5" drives. It's $40 a year for a box wide enough for DVD's. -- Ed Light Better World News TV Channel: http://realnews.com Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related: http://ivaw.org http://couragetoresist.org http://antiwar.com Send spam to the FTC at Thanks, robots. |
#15
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
Ed Light wrote:
On 5/10/2011 8:23 PM, Arno wrote: Ed wrote: On 5/10/2011 2:26 PM, Arno wrote: Depending on your local customs, you might be able to rent a safe deposit box cheaply. I have one of my USB backup drives in a safe deposit box. I take it out once a month and update the backups. ... What do you pay for the box? Here in Swizerland it is something like 100EUR/USD per year for a standard-sized box that can take two external 3.5" drives. It's $40 a year for a box wide enough for DVD's. Thanks for the info. You do not get ones that small here, but this price is entirely reasonable. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans |
#16
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
Amusing and somewhat timely discussion, working through regenerating
backups. DAT Old 2003 DDS2 tape took a few goes to get data off in DDS4 drive, despite correctly stored & retension first. I was considering using DAT40 or DAT72 as a secondary backup device, but I fundamentally distrust data restored from it. It is very easy to get a creeping corruption which gets subsequently re backed over the years and only detected years later. Not exactly good if it is tax & account archives. HD Ironically I have never lost any data stored on hard drive, but I introduce new drives into the pool regularly and use multiple brands. CD/DVD Early burners & poor dye were a recipe for disaster, running some A- One Gold tonight on a burner I got 40% failure - just picked them up on the way home. It shows the need to match media (Verbatim Indonesia a better bet) with drive (which do not seem to be built with longevity in mind). MO Magneto optical 3.5" has proven totally reliable, bar a few miss- formatted discs in the early 2000s easily spotted as they were unusable. Media from Sony, Maxell, Fujifilm & Verbatim - probably only 2 manufacturers in there. Small capacity at 640MB limits use to core critical data, but longevity seems ok thus far. Spare brand new drives checked and unlike dreaded DDS2 I can guarantee thus far to read a disk in any drive without problem. Paper Ironically this still seems to be quite robust! Unfortunately the cost of storing several hundred thousand pages is actually pretty ridiculous in "self store" units these days. A lot of companies are shredding for paper-less office. Frankly it comes down to data set size & criticality, usually there is a smaller critical data set which can not be regenerated and for that higher redundancy across multiple media is financially practical rather than applying the same cost structure to the entire data set. Multiple copies in multiple locations really does matter. I am not too impressed by "clouds" re recent security breaches, and apart from LTO 1/2" tape I am not impressed with tape - it makes me uneasy. HD makers have a history of shovelling out the initial-dip products as they change geographic location than binning them (every time Seagate changed plant location the first products off the line were doorstops but still ended up in retail). Dropping both backups down the stairs is not a joke, been there - one a HD & one a DVD-RAM cartridge. The HD was scrap, the DVD-RAM ok but from re-using the same DVD-RAM disk in video recorders I am wholly unimpressed by their "overwrite count" despite being type-4 cartridge. MO & HD seems to win out, MO for the critical stuff and never sell that spare drive. One reason why LTO is twice the price it appears unfortunately. |
#18
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
On May 25, 1:24*am, Arno wrote:
I second that. Unfortunately my MOD drive was SCSI and I could not get the controller to work anymore without jumpong through hoops. I did pull all data off my MODs some years ago without any problems, and some of them written 7-8 years before. Likewise. I sold my SCSI MO drive & Adaptec EZ-SCSI PCMCIA because its short cable was cumbersome with a laptop and a growing data set meant generating 2-3 copies became expensive. I moved to HD & DVD-RAM, mainly due to cheap 4.7/9.4GB phase change media & cheap drives. Thankfully the HD backups remained intact: DVD-RAM demonstrated it could lose data and when subjected to repeated overwrites could lose video far sooner than specifications suggested. I returned to MO very quickly. Definitely an archival media that deserves the term. Also definitely not commercially viable, it seems people do not care about longterm archiving or just do not get it. The number of people still recommending consumer-trash writable DVDs as archival medium in this group tells it all. I do not understand it either. CDR DVD are ok for content which you can recreate - such as films. My experience is they are more a vehicle for those selling than those betting their own business survivability on them. DVD-RAM is really, really bad. I did evaluate a set of different cartritges a while ago and was very unimpressed. Many did exceed the ISO error limits and only repeated full overwrites grought dem down a bit. I don't need this high level of media maintenance at all. As I found, used like a "fixed disk" in a DVD-RAM video recorder their overwrite count was dire before "recorder lockup". MO & HD seems to win out, MO for the critical stuff and never sell that spare drive. All the major data recovery outfits do recover MOs. MO was great for tax & medical records. Tape requires good technology & good storage technique. It is very unfortunate that MO did not get enough sales for the vendors to continue development. I now use spinning drives (one on my side with 3-way RAID1, 2 virtual servers) and regular automated tests of the data for critical data and two external HDs with hadrware tetst every few months for less critical stuff. So far so good. But except going back to MO, I do not see any write & store solution. As to the "cloud", the word "pathetic" comes to mind. Cloud is marketing creating a revenue stream out of a box of bits :-) BTW, I completely agree that archival data falls into "must have" and "nive to have" classes that justify different levels of effort. The problem with all media is there comes a point when it moves from cash-cow to cash-dog and quality control can decline, which may be the media you just stored the business archives on. Hard drives are particularly vulnerable to this, at least when miniscribe shipped bricks you could chisel some 1s & 0s on them. The other good thing about paper is (as Enron & Arthur Anderson found) that it takes a long time to shred a pile of paper, but very little time to shred some files (or DVDs). |
#19
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
wrote:
On May 25, 1:24?am, Arno wrote: [...] The problem with all media is there comes a point when it moves from cash-cow to cash-dog and quality control can decline, which may be the media you just stored the business archives on. Hard drives are particularly vulnerable to this, at least when miniscribe shipped bricks you could chisel some 1s & 0s on them. Before my time, I think when I got my first HDD, Miniscribe was already out of the business. The other good thing about paper is (as Enron & Arthur Anderson found) that it takes a long time to shred a pile of paper, but very little time to shred some files (or DVDs). Indeed. Whether that is an advantage or disadvantage depends on your point of view though ;-) Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans |
#20
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Using a hard disk drive as an archival media
I would argue against the very idea of archiving. Commodity PC hardware
is very cheap, and can be forced into serving as a reliable backup system. But it cannot be forced into serving as a reliable archive system. Here is my minimal arrangement for data security. The principal behind this scheme is protection against an undetected failure. If you insist on using an archive scheme with commodity PC hardware (and software!) then you can never obtain this protection. This scheme requires a minimum of three USB disk drives that are used as backup media. I start by KEEPING all of my data in my computer. Old photos, email from ten years ago, all of it. No exceptions! No archived media! I am not going to spend ten thousand dollars on professional grade tape libraries and I am certainly not going to trust commodity (cheap) peecee hardware to archive any data that I care about. I keep two drives near the computer, and I use them to perform backups on alternate days. In this way, I get a measure of protection against failure of backup software, which is a non-trivial concern. I also get protection against hardware failure in the backup media (disk drives). The third drive I keep offsite. This gives me protection against fire, theft, incoming artillery, and so forth. About once a month, I rotate the positions of the three disk drives. The key point is that I regularly write to all of my backup media. This serves as a test for hardware failure. In other words, I am constantly defending myself against the undetected failure. If I want greater security, I rotate the drives more frequently. If I want longer backup history, I add more USB drives to the rotation. -- David Arnstein (00) {{ }} ^^ |
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