I don't believe there is a solution that does not involve active
management. You can't write your data and pick up those media 25
years later and expect to get your data back -- not without some
heroic effort involving the construction of your own hardware.
I have data from Brian Matthews' lab going back to the mid-1970's
and those data started life on 7-track mag tapes. I've moved them
from there to 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, to 9-track 6250 bpi tapes, to
just about every density of Exabyte tape, to DVD, and most recently
to external magnetic hard drives (each with USB, Firewire, and eSATA
interfaces). The hard drives are about five years old and so far
are holding up. Last time I checked I could still read the 10 year
old DVD's. I'm having real trouble reading Exabyte tapes.
Write your data to some medium that you expect to last for at least
five years but anticipate that you will then have to move them to
something else.
Instead of spending time working on the 100 year solution you should
spend your time annotating your data so that someone other than you
can figure out what it is. Lack of annotation and editing is the
biggest problem with old data.
Dale Tronrud
P.S. If someone needs the intensities for heavy atom derivatives of
Thermolysin written in VENUS format, I'm your man.
On 12/12/2012 1:57 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
Better option? Certainly not TAPE or electromechanical disk drive. CD's and
DVD's don't last nearly that long and James Holton has pointed out.
I suppose there might be a "cloud" solution where you rely upon data just
floating around out there in cyberspace with a life of its own.
Richard
On Dec 12, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote:
Good luck on your search in 100 years for a computer with a
USB port. You will also need software that can read a FAT32
file system.
Dale "Glad I didn't buy a lot of disk drives with Firewire" Tronrud
On 12/12/2012 1:02 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
SanDisk advertises a "Memory Vault" disk for archival storage of photos that
they claim will last 100 years.
(note: they do have a scheme for estimating lifetime of the memory, Arrhenius
Equation ... interesting. Check it out:
www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/ and click the Chronolock tab.).
Has anyone here looked into this or seen similar products?
Richard Gillilan
MacCHESS
