Long-term backup storage media

Question

Rumors say CDs and DVDs won't remember your data longer than ten years. Are there backup media that do better?

Answer 1

Hard Drives. Space is dirt cheap these days, you can grab a few TB worth of internal hard drives at a fairly low price. Even external hard drives aren't too expensive.

Answer 2

Regarding longevity, you'll probably accumulate data too fast for the media to be a problem. 7 years from now you might have enough DVD's to fill a couple Blu-rays. 7 more years and you'll have a stack of Blu-rays ready to consolidate on whatever the next big thing is.

For now, Patrick McFarland's How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media comes out in favor of DVD+R, specifically Taiyo Yuden's:

To begin with, I do not recommend CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW media in any form for permanent storage. This is mostly a no-brainer, but those discs are meant to be able to be changed after burning, and they are simply unsuitable for long-term archival storage. I also do not recommend DVD-R media due to DVD+R’s superior error correction and burning control.

That said, I recommend Taiyo Yuden media across the board. Taiyo Yuden currently manufactures 52x CD-R, 16x DVD-R, and 8x DVD+R media in normal shiney silver, inkjet printable, and thermal printable forms. Taiyo Yuden may be one of the most expensive (if not the most expensive), but their media quality is unsurpassed.

A recent update shows he still affirms this position.

I thought I read somewhere that the Library of Congress uses MAM-A archival gold DVD's but considering the cost I stick with TY's. I usually purchase through http://www.rima.com, while McFarland recommends another vendor in his article.

Answer 3

Rumors say CDs and DVDs won't remember your data longer than ten years.

You just said it: RUMOURS! :)

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) has published the following longevity estimates for recordable optical media:

Manufacturers' estimated recorded life span.

CD-R: 50-200 years

CD-RW: 20-100 years

DVD+R: 30-100 years

DVD+RW: 30 years

BD-R 50+ years

So, chances are that you may not live long enough to prove these estimates wrong! :)

Now compare that to the average lifespan of a platter hard disk (2-10 years). Optical media win that contest hands down.

And then there is the good old stone tablet which will last a couple of thousand years. But the data density of 0.001 kbit/kg is a bit of a showstopper. :P

But in IT, the Cranberry Diamondisc DVD is considered to be the Holy Grail of long term storage, they boast a life span 1000 (one thousand) years. Of course it requires special hardware to burn these discs.

Answer 4

I'm not sure hard drives are any better than CD/DVD long term. The only way to be really sure is to keep checking the data and refreshing it. There are CD's/DVD's that are specifically designed for long term storage but as always these are more expensive.

Answer 5

From http://www.superwarehouse.com/HP_5.2_GB_Magneto_Optical_Disk/88146J/p/54344:

HP magneto-optical rewritable cartridges allow virtually unlimited read/write cycles, making them the ideal choice for data management in information-intensive environments. HP write-once cartridges are designed for permanent storage of data that can't be altered or erased. Both disk formats have an archival life of 100 years...

Answer 6

Paper backups using an efficient encoding scheme also remain an option. It is not handy and takes a lot of space, but it is robust and long-lasting.

Answer 7

I think the question that must be asked is "how long-term is long-term"?

Quality paper is probably the most efficient low-end long-term storage currently known(300+ years).

But if you're looking to archive records in the event of nuclear blast, you might try etchings on metal in a can in a cave.

But if you want to store company records for 50 years, hard disks disconnected and stored in a vibration-less environment together with paper documents on the interface & data formats is not a bad plan.

But if you want to publish historical-class data for the next 200 years, ie, you're investigating for a library or similar institution, you want to make sure that the information is usable when we go to The Hypernet, so you might be investigating a redundant array of cloud data storage centers from different companies with a common query-able interface published on the current Internet.

But if you want to archive historical-class data, you want something that is probably similar to a ROM-style hard disk. (I'm taking a guess that those exist for long-term archive storage).

But are you storing text? video? pictures? binaries? Each of those has different information characteristics and can be stored a little differently.

There's no 'right' answer here until you narrow your focus a bit.

Answer 8

I think it has to do with how much you're willing to spend. I've thought about this in the past and the best solution I could come up with was a NAS with 2 large HDDs in RAID 1 configuration. This way you're protected from HDD failure and I'm pretty sure that Ethernet will still be around 10 years from now. Only worry is if the NAS itself breaks down, so you'd need a quality one.

Answer 9

The only way to guarantee long life is via redundancy. Keep 2 backup copies of everything, as it's unlikely that both will go bad. Try to vary the media types, for example for DVD don't use the same manufacturer for both copies, or use two hard drive, or one hard drive with DVD/Blu-ray copy. The advantage of a large hard drive is that you can verify it regularly. Also, the SpinRite utility, available from http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm and costing $89, can recover a hard disk and even refresh it magnetically so the recorded data won't magnetically fade out with time (but it only works on internal drives).

Answer 10

And now you can store it for as long as 1000 years: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/DiamonDisk-DVD-Storage-Cranberry-Thousand,news-5112.html

Answer 11

depends on your data volume

• USB flash drive- I sill have one 129 MB survived after washing in a machine and after all these years still works. When you start feeling that USB standart start to disapear or speed start to differ too much (i.e. USB 5.0 is the current standart)- transfer to the next new thing before is too late

• or some skin for CD/DVDs like this

Answer 12

Tapes seem to be a good option for long term and big volume archiving.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/20/2355225

Flash drives might be worth researching too.