I was slightly disturbed after reading the article on Slashdot about CD-Rs having a relatively short lifetime. I had thought that a CD-R would last 10, maybe 20, years. Boy, was I off the mark! A better assumption is that a CD-R might last only two years. One thing is certain: CD-Rs are not a good long-term backup medium. And that raises the question: what is a good long-term backup medium?
Now, I have a confession to make. I have been talking to relatives and trying to convince them that digital photos (JPEG) and digital movies (MPEG1) are good, and that they can store them on CD-Rs. I guess I'll have to retract the part about storing them on CD-Rs.
Back to the question of a good long-term storage medium... CD-Rs are not it. Hard drives are cheap and seem to last a long time. The USB pluggable hard drives are perhaps not the best for everyday use, but as a backup medium, they might be useful. Having two or more computers on a network with large hard drives could be a solution that provides redundancy if you store the data on both hard drives. Perhaps this is the best short-term solution for long-term storage.
In the longer term, I fully expect that a new technology will become available that solves the problem of archival storage of digital data for consumers. I don't think I could speculate as to what that might be. With very fast Internet connections, it could be an offsite rental facility. One would pay a yearly fee for the offsite storage.
Posted by Doug Sauder at August 25, 2003 08:56 AM