On 07/01/13 16:39, Mark H. Wood wrote: > I'd suggest assuming some periodic read-only use, since we *should* be > testing our backups regularly to discover decay *before* it makes > something irretrievable.
I would assume the decay to make it irretrievable the moment you discover it. Hoping the bit flips in a non-vital piece of (meta)data seems like a risky backup strategy. Flash memory stores its data as an electrical charge, which can leak away. It does so very slowly, but it still does[1]. We are talking about years. And reading a cell does not "refresh" it, so read-only use will in principle not do anything to extend the storage time. Peter. [1] Johan Wevers mentioned radioactive radiation. Sounds plausible to me, that should be capable of knocking electrons away, I'd think as a layman. -- I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail. You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy. My key is available at http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~lebbing/pubkey.txt _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users