--On Wednesday, January 11, 2012 03:40:20 PM -0500 Alan McKay alan.mckay@gmail.com wrote:
Well, the scientists are talking longer than 7 years so HDs just are not going to cut it
Regarding the use of hard drives, you might want to have a look at this: http://www.lockss.org/locksswiki/files/ISandT2008.pdf
At any rate, if you're concerned with archiving beyond seven years, you probably also need to add another dimension to your archival problem. In the professional archival/library industry they're quite aware of having to maintain information longer than the lifetime of any of:
- the individual media that it is stored on (eg: "the tape got too old and is now throwing errors")
- the media type (eg: "my 10 year backups have been stored on ExaByte tapes in a humidity/temperature controlled vault, but I can't find a working ExaByte tape drive anymore", or "does anyone have a drive for my 8-inch floppy? How about a computer that will talk to the drive?")
- the data format (eg: "the document I need is in AppleWriter format. I was able to retrieve it from backups, and the previously recorded checksums match, but I can't find a program that will read it!")
For long term storage, you may need to be able to not just put stuff away, but also have a policy (and the resources!) to periodically migrate data to newer media & formats. This can get expensive in time and money of course; your stakeholders may need to weigh in again periodically to evaluate the value of the data vs the cost of migration.
I'm sure that there are some archivist-related mailing lists out there that can better explain the depth of the horror.
Depending on the value of the data, you may also need to look at multiple copies. And then there's disaster recovery ...
Just because you didn't have enough problems already ...
(BTW, the main site http://www.lockss.org about LOCKSS looks interesting from an acedemic point of view, albiet not relevent here.)
Devin