The "government" is a bit broad and unless you understand a the risk and
recovery considerations for a particular system, the merits and
application of the approach used by any particular group is not easily
assessed. I am always careful with government approaches as they tend
to serve a different value system than that faced by most of us in our
own business ventures. In most government environments, if a
catastrophic loss of data occurs, quite often, few if any are
penalized, and no matter what the financial hit there is no real
financial penalty to the operation of the organization as there almost
often is in industry. This environment does not necessarily lead to
practices and procedures that you would want to implement to protect
your own at-risk assets --- just my experience.
Otis Wright
Shawn K. wrote:
Alright, lets just say I know someone in "the government" and this someone
says that the government uses hard drives... The NSA also uses hard drives
that's fairly common knowledge as many geeks are aware and admire that they
built their file server on a special foundation to absorb the ultra low
frequency vibrations emanating from the earth....
-Shawn
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Studdert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 8:29 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Implications for Film (storage opinions)
On 25 May 2004 at 19:08, Shawn K. wrote:
Well Rob, from what I've heard the government uses hard drives to archive
information. Seriously, quality hard drives are simply the best storage
option. If you have a RAID array, the chances of having such a
catastrophic
failure that all your data is lost are next to zero...
Who knows what "the government" uses. What I know that during my period in
the
industry I saw many array failures, from controller failures to lightening
strikes and actual media failure of a series of drives due to manufacturing
errors.
CD's can become unreadable without you knowing it, even when
stored properly. (I haven't used the writeable DVD's so I can't comment
on
their longevity.) I have had cd's that were guaranteed to last 90 years
go bad
after 2 years.
The archives from last moth with reveal a smorgasbord of information
concerning
this very topic from users with much experience many with contrary opinions.
Check the threads "CD Storage" and "CD-R lifetimes disputed"
Rob Studdert
HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA
Tel +61-2-9554-4110
UTC(GMT) +10 Hours
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/
Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
