Tom: What ever media is decided on remember this. The life expectancy (readability) is at most 10 years for DVD and CD's . I had a long discussion with an expert and he just does not have a satisfactory answer (IMO) for anything long term. I suspect tape (even IBM's tape drives) to be iffy at 10 years as well. Technology changes so fast that there isn't a really great long term storage option. Ed'
----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Marchant <m42tom-ibmm...@yahoo.com> To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Cc: Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 1:21 PM Subject: Re: Data offload to DVDs or external drives On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:08:09 -0400, O'Brien, David W. wrote: >What options (if any) are available for migrating these old study files and contents of accounts to storage media such as DVDs and external hard drives that could be securely held (off-line) by the agencies? If you really mean DVD, I'd suggest caution. IBM DVD media is not very reliable. If you are going to move the data to a PC to create the DVD, I think it would be better to write it to a hard drive. Even at that, I think I'd want to create two copies on two hard drives. You might want to consider what Shai Hess offers. -- Tom Marchant ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
