[rescue] Floppy disks and lifespans

[Patrick Finnegan]

For backups, nothing beats tape.

I use LTO-3 tape in a StorageTek L700 library at home, and haven't had any
problem re-reading tapes.  I just wish I had newer firmware, so I could use
the LTO-4 drives I have.

My first level backup though is to spinning disk off-site. It's a lot
easier to recover from last night's rsync, and it's easier to tell if the
backup copy is still good.

Pat

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 9:27 AM, Ethan O'Toole <ethan at 757tech.net> wrote:

> I'm wondering if any of you have any hard data on the quality of media over
>> time, such as floppies and CDROMS.  Not a terribly important question I'll
>> admit but one I have always been curious about.  Plenty of my old C64
>> disks
>> still worked the last time I used them and they were almost 30 years old
>> at
>> the time.  that's both the 5 1/4 180K per side ones and the 800k double
>> sided..  I have found PC disks from the 90s that were completely unusuable
>> and had been stored in the same place and under the same conditions.
>> Information density may be part of the reason for that.
>>
>
> CD-R should last much longer than DVD-R.
>
> I bought a BD-R drive and discs with the idea of long term backup. Wrote 3
> copies of stuff to some discs, and put them on a shelf in dark and nice
> temp and in cases. 7 months later none of the data was readable :-( Memorex
> discs which are rebranded some other company. Wasn't impressed.
>
> I used to run a site called Dustbunny, planning to bring it back. Can't
> wait for the 8TB seagates next early next year.
>
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