About Data Rot - Storing a Hard Drive for ~10 years

dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd · November 15, 2016

2 hours ago, Litargirio said:

As I said, accesing the PC will be impossible in the ~10 years.

Does the "10 years" account for good behavior?

Joking aside, put the data on all 3 hard drives and use a hash check tool to calculate the hashes of the important files. That way you'll be able to verify the file integrity on all hard drives afterwards and see if your files are intact on the HDD you're trying to pull them from.

Sure, it takes time because you'll need to check each file individually before retrieving them, but if the data is important enough you'll be happy to spend the extra time to get the ones that are intact and avoid those that are partially ruined because a bit flipped.

I went with the pro version of Raymond's MD5 & SHA Checksum utility ( link to official site ) and that has served me just fine so far. I can let it run on an entire folder with all subfolders and files. The result is a huge list of hashes that can be saved as a text file or a spreadsheet.

Another (more expensive) option is to add cloud storage on top. Cheapest one that comes to mind is Carbonite basic, which is $60 per year with unlimited space ( link ). Set up some form of automated payment with your bank and cancel that when you're available again and retrieved your data.

Sure, $600 is a lot of money and there's no guarantee that the company will be around in 10 years time. So for such a long duration I'm not really a fan of that approach.

A cheaper option would be to make a selection of the very most important data and put that on a free Dropbox, Google Drive and/or Onedrive. Those allow 5GB each IIRC. Cloud storage is also a good place to store that file with the hashes of the data which is on your HDDs because data centers usually have protection measures to prevent bitrot, bitflips etc. So that file will be bit-for-bit identical when you return.

My suggestion would be to limit the most important data to 5GB or less, and upload it to all 3 of the free options mentioned above. Chances are that in 10 years time at least one of them will still exist. That way even if the files are gone on all your HDDs, you'll still have that cloud backup.

glitchmaster0001 · November 15, 2016

3 hours ago, mariushm said:

You would also have to pack a couple or more tape readers and/or cd/dvd readers.

Think about IDE cd drives ... in 10 years we may still have SATA ports, but would you still be able to buy sata optical drives to read your discs?

And your tape readers... maybe your computers in 10 years won't have the required ports anymore .. think how usb 1.1 devices are barely supported these days and some laptops don't even have regular USB connectors anymore, only usb 3 type c or some of these miniaturized ports. who knows what kind of thunderbold 6 or usb 5 or some other connectors we would have.

I guess best bet would be to find some kind of old laptop with some usb ports and maybe a couple of external usb drive boxes in which you would insert your drives and then you'd be able to access the contents in 10 years using that laptop and usb connection. From laptop you'd be able to transfer data through regular ethernet cable or usb or wireless if in 10 years you'd still have devices supporting 802.11 b/g/n/ac

Almost laughing, but probably the safest storage would be to encode your data in some kind of Base64 or some similar code and print your data on archival paper with some OCR font and very small font size with laser printers... when you want the data back, you put the paper into a scanner and scan the page at high resolution and do OCR on the characters and get your binary files back.

Youtube uses Base64 (or something similar) for their youtube ids... so you can see already long numbers which would otherwise take 16-32 bytes or more into a few characters.

Wrong the industry still uses tapes CDs and Floppy disk drives as legacy type of storage medium and will use them for long term storage of things like archival data