Conservation of data

[Yeasman]

I have been looking for a conventional way (no tape cassettes, etc), to store data reliably for a prolonged period of time (5-10 years). What is the best medium to do so?

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Yeasman said:

I have been looking for a conventional way (no tape cassettes, etc), to store data reliably for a prolonged period of time (5-10 years). What is the best medium to do so?

tape

but if you just dont like tape then you can burn them to dvd and bluray but you sure better hope you can find a working blu-ray player 10 years from now

[Firewrath9]

Hard drives

buy some cheap 8TB external drives, and shuck em.

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, Yeasman said:

I have been looking for a conventional way (no tape cassettes, etc), to store data reliably for a prolonged period of time (5-10 years). What is the best medium to do so?

Multiple mechanical drives, running 24/7... at least two separate copies of everything. If one drive fails, replace and recover data from other copy/copies.super small price per GB (like $70+ for 4 TB so ~ 0.02$ per GB per drive)... electricity is peanuts...

Could be stored in some controlled environment, turned off, but should be powered at least every 4-6 months or so, for a few hours

No optical media (dvd,bluray), too unreliable, bit rotting,delamination, scratches etc

tapes... drives are too expensive...

See also services like Amazon Glacier... would cost you around 0.004$/GB/Month to store it ... so around 0.3$ per GB for 5 years.

oh...plus some fee to retrieve data when done.

 

[Windows7ge]

Personally if tape is a no-go and you have a lot to store and you want cost effectiveness I can think of two:

 

HDDs - cold storage (I can't say bit rot wouldn't set in by 5-10 years though so you'd wanna refresh this periodically)

HDDs - with a reliable File System (like ZFS)