what's the best long-term storage media
tips to avoid losing data
in your lifetime
hi everyone i'm leo notenboom for
askleo.com where ask leo's lifetime
started in 2003 and i've been answering
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so there's a lot of opinion about
exactly
what you should use to store something
for a very long time
the question that i originally got i
currently have images stored on memory
cards thumb drives
cds and dvds which is best long term
my off the cuff answer probably none of
the above
they all have a little bit of a problem
optical media cds and dvds for example
well as it turns out unless you've
actually
purchased archival quality
then they're fading as you sit
over the years they will actually start
to deteriorate
and the result is that the data on those
disks may
no longer be recoverable that's
kind of scary and exactly what you don't
want when it comes to archival media
similarly when it comes to any kind of
flash memory i'm going to start though
with the
inexpensive sd cards micro sd cards
usb thumb drives that kind of flash
memory is typically
relatively inexpensive and there's
actually
no good data that says it's going to
last any length of time
it lasts long enough for us to use them
but when
all of a sudden you're talking about
keeping information
for years decades even
then cheap flash memory is actually not
where i would want to place my bets
now there's an argument to be made that
more expensive
ssd which is also a form of flash memory
could potentially last significantly
longer
again the jury's not in on that one
the problem is that we just don't know
and
once again i'm not prepared to place a
long-term
bet with the data that i want to be able
to read
20 30 or 40 years from now
so my recommendation when it comes to
long-term storage media traditional hard
drives
traditional spinning disk magnetic hard
drives
yes they probably do deteriorate over
time
but the experience of many so far is
that we really kind of sort of do
understand how long they'll last and
it's a long time
they do use hard drives for
long-term archival in a number of
situations
so one thing to consider for long-term
archives
is to copy things to an external
traditional hard drive
and then store that thing somewhere
that's part of
what i do i don't do it very often i do
something else which is something i
would actually have you strongly
consider
almost instead of the external hard
drives
and that's this 20 years ago
i had data on floppies then i had data
on
cds and today i have it on external hard
drives
the process though that caused that
migration to happen is simply that
at some point i realized okay floppy
disks were
out compact disks were in dvds were in
i should copy everything over so i
copied all of the information
from the floppy disks before they
deteriorated
to something else then a few years later
i realized that i was getting an
awful lot of cds and dvds in a bucket
downstairs
i decided it was time to migrate all
that data
to hard drives so over the course of
some amount of time i carefully copied
the contents of
all those cds and dvds to an external
hard drive
now those external hard drives are
actually
in use they're connected to a machine
that's running all the time
and that machine every night makes
backup copies of all of that archived
information
my expectation is that at some point in
the future
i will migrate again to whatever
the next best long-term storage solution
turns out to be
maybe it is those ssds that we're
playing with right now
maybe it's something else that we
haven't even seen yet but the point is
that every so often
the data that i care about the most
which generally refers to my photographs
gets copied it gets refreshed it gets
placed on
new media before the old media wears out
that's really the only way to ensure
that your data will be there when you
need it
20 30 40 maybe 50 years from now now
one thing i haven't talked about is the
cloud right
the cloud online storage is kind of sort
of
its own thing and it is in fact a part
of my long-term backup strategy
my photos those things that i care about
the most
are in fact stored in the cloud i happen
to have them on dropbox
the issue there is that dropbox when it
comes to backing up
is really only one place
the same is true for any cloud storage
provider
they have their own backups but their
backups are not for you and me
you and i are still responsible for
making sure that our data is backed up
if somebody hacks into my account and
deletes all my files
i can't be assured that dropbox or
onedrive or any of the others
will restore that data from their
backups like i said their backups
protect
them my backups protect me and that's
why i continually refer to online
storage via dropbox or onedrive as only
one place and that's for the statement
if the data is in
only one place it's not backed up
so i have my photographs on hard disks
in my basement
two as it turns out i have it on other
hard disks but that's more of a side
effect of how i access them
and i have them all in the cloud now the
neat thing about the cloud is that we
don't care
we don't know what storage technology
they happen to use
they use whatever is convenient for
their needs dropbox uses hard disks of
some flavor
onedrive probably uses something else
and i'm absolutely convinced that the
hard drives that stored my photos on
dropbox
say 10 years ago they're long gone those
hard drives have been replaced with
newer ones newer servers whatever
they're handling this migration of
technology transparently and in the
background
so using onedrive or dropbox or any
online service provider
is one way to have another copy of your
data placed
somewhere that is independent of the
storage media
as long as that service exists as long
as your account isn't hacked or lost
then your data remains accessible to you
but
it's only one place so it needs to be an
additional place
alongside the backups hard disks
whatever it is you keep yourself on
premises
now there's another aspect archival that
i think a lot of people
i do get comments on it from time to
time and i think it's an important one
to address and that is
formats one of the things that
happens is not only can i not read
say the floppies that i had 20 years ago
the actual format of the information on
those floppies
some of them isn't even supported if i
did have a drive
that is true for hard disks as well hard
disks for example these days are usually
formatted with either the ntfs or exfat
filing system do we know that in 40 or
50 years there will be machines that can
read that
i don't know i think it's a pretty safe
bet just because so much of our
information today is
but it's an interesting bet and it's one
that
periodically migrating to the most
recent storage technology
actually solves if 20 years from now
if there's a completely different
storage system that uses a completely
different disk
format copying all of my information
onto that storage
basically makes this problem go away i
don't need to rely on the old ntfs or
exfat hard disks
i've got this new whatever it is that
has been invented 20 years
from now the other one that's a little
harder to solve
is file formats will there be support
for dot doc files in 50 years
i honestly don't know again it would
seem like there would be
given that it is so ubiquitous it is so
popular
but is it something that you really want
to count on
especially if you're not talking about
file formats like docx the the ones that
we think
of often as being ubiquitous and
everywhere
if you've got some uh obscure
program that you rely on that stores its
data in a proprietary format
i can pretty much guarantee you that
that data probably won't be readable 50
years from now
now you may not care that's fine but
it's something to think about
it's one of those cases where if your
data is in a proprietary format
and it's something that you want to
archive maybe you want to save it in a
less proprietary format saving your data
as
maybe csv which is just a text file
which is one of the fundamental file
formats that i suspect will last pretty
much forever
if you have a document be it in an
obscure word processor or some other
thing
maybe saving it as pdf is the way to go
maybe
printing to pdf is the way to go for
even more obscure file formats that
don't
natively support saving to pdf pdf
is one of the things that i actually am
placing my bets on
and i say that because there is so much
information historical records today
that
are printed using pdf file format
even though it may not be a common file
format it may not even be
used 50 years from now i'm pretty
convinced
that there will in fact be pdf readers
there will be technology capable of
interpreting the pdf files
and displaying their contents
the one kickback i always get when i
talk about digital archiving and digital
backup and saving information digitally
is
you know what paper is always readable
i agree sort of the
issue is paper is flammable
paper disappears for a variety of
reasons
not related to technology your house
could flood your house could burn up you
could lose the paper you could do
whatever
you could make photocopies i suppose but
that all of a sudden becomes
even more work than just scanning the
files and storing the digital copies
somewhere else
so if paper makes you feel comfortable
by all means go for it but
if like me you are natively digital
you are almost paperless then
take some steps to ensure that the
information you're saving today
is either on media that will last a long
time
that it is potentially copied from media
to media that will
last a long time before the prior media
wears out and consider whether or not
you have enough copies in enough
different places to make sure that that
data is not lost
because of fire theft flood or whatever
i hope this spurred some thought that's
really what it boils down to i want you
to think about these things
as you talk about your own backup
strategy
and as you think about exactly who wants
these files in the future
if you've got kids or grandkids they'll
appreciate
what it is you save if it is very
possible
maybe future historians may wonder what
the heck was going on with our
generation
and they'll be using their digital
archives to answer some questions maybe
your information will be part of what
they dig
up at any rate like i said i hope that
was helpful i hope it was thought
provoking
for any updates for related links for
comments and for more ideas visit
askleo.com 5787
i'm leo notenboom this is askleo.com
thanks for watching
you