Dug out my old 210MB Harddrive from 15 years ago, Windows 3.11 - those were the days. Fired up OK. I think my forensic machine scratched its head and could not believe that something 210MB in size was a harddrive!! That's progress for you!!
Because of their relative cheapness hdds are now a popular format for archiving. However in ten years time when you remove it from the shelf, trip over the cat (or whatever) and drop it, it will probably stop working at that point. IMHO there are more robust media to archive to.
Regards
Greetings,
What form of robust media would you use? I'm still a fan of backing up to two hard drives. One will get sacrificed to the cat deity and the other will still work.
The cost per GB of hard drives is very hard to beat….
-David
Remember that it is not just the storage media that counts. The storage media is only one part of the system. Programs, file formats, operating systems, file systems, interfaces etc are changing.
For example - a 9 track magnetic tape stored in the best environment still won't be of much use if you don't have a tape drive to read it, or can't understand the encoding of the data.
In 20 years will we still have IDE/Sata interfaces? Will we still be storing data on spinning platters?
^^^I am dealing with that right now. I am trying to recover information from our 911 system. Have the tapes, just no drive.
Try
It is a proprietary multi-track DAT. I need to find an old Eventide or Dictaphone DAT player. Anyone got one floating around their 911 call center?