On 12/12/2012 3:19 PM, Bosch, Juergen wrote:
Hey Dale,
you really should get your personal RAID with hot swappable discs, since you
don't like Firewire, how about Thunderbolt and a
Pegasus RAID with 6 bays ? If a drive fails you replace it with a new one.
Last summer someone in the lab above ours decided they needed a full
sink of water. Before this task was complete they decided they needed
to go home. The resulting flood destroyed the contents of the desks of
two of our lab members. That was a lot of paper that didn't make 100
years - including a "Handbook of Chemistry and Physics" that had almost
made 60.
If the lab RAID had been under the waterfall it would have lost all
of its drives in one go. I don't know how big a RAID number you have
to have to survive that, but RAID-5 isn't going to do it.
I have run a flash drive through my washing machine a couple times
and it is still going strong so I have high hopes for solid-state
memory. It will be several years before 1 TB SSD's drop in price
enough for the next move of my little archive. The SanDisk "Memory
Vault" that started this thread maxes out at 16 GB.
Dale Tronrud
By the way if anybody has a functional DAT4 tape drive, could I send you one to
read out a tape with some data ? If so, then off
list reply would be nice, thanks.
Jürgen
On Dec 12, 2012, at 5:22 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote:
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/
<http://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
......................
Jürgen Bosch
Johns Hopkins University
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
615 North Wolfe Street, W8708
Baltimore, MD 21205
Office: +1-410-614-4742
Lab: +1-410-614-4894
Fax: +1-410-955-2926
http://lupo.jhsph.edu
