I think the idea is to see archive maintenance as an ongoing process. To
maintain a digital archive, I see it as essential to re-copy the data every
few years to new media. In addition to allowing verification, this will
allow bridging the various gaps presented by constantly shifting storage
technologies. i.e. for a while, it was common to have SCSI and firewire
interfaces on workstations; that would've been a good time to migrate to
Firewire drives.
Factors in my decision to use hard drive mechanisms as primary archive
media:
- easy to archive large amounts of data without handling many individual
pieces of media. This saves time and labor downstream as each piece needs
to be cataloged and stored.
- easy to copy a significant chunk of archived material in one move, savin=
g
time and labor when the archive is migrated to the next medium.
- costs per MB are reasonable. 1TB HDD is around $100. 1TB of DVD-R is
roughly 240 discs, at $0.30 ea is $72.00 not including sleeves or cases.
- de-facto, I was always way behind on archiving via DVD-R becuase of the
work involved. Typical doc film mix would involve backing up to eight or
ten DVD-Rs, plus their redundant copies. It would take much of a day to
archive a single project, time I could not afford to spend.
Significant downside is that the medium is writeable, meaning it's
susceptible to filesystem damage or file corruption. Corruption could be
carried from the "A" copy to the "B" copy during synchronizing.
A better system would involve checksumming, perhaps zipping or using a unix
tool like tar. I access files from my archive semi-frequently, so it's
helpful to have it all easily mountable and file-accessible on my system, s=
o
I make this tradeoff knowingly. If others have suggestions, I'd love to
hear them.
-jeremiah
Rob Danielson wrote --
-snip-
> Its interesting to read that folks are using redundant drives as a
> primary storage medium. Maybe drive hardware, stored under the right
> conditions will work fine in 30-50 years. It might be faster to
> convert data from a drive to the improved media that come along than
> from optical disks. However, it could also become a headache to mount
> current drives or a disc reader on a computers made even 15 years
> from now. Certainly, both drives and optical discs will look ancient
> in 100 years. Consider the challenge of mounting a SCSI drive on a
> computer produced in 2009.
>
>
-snip-
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jeremiah moore | SOUND |
http://www.jeremiahmoore.com/
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