"Petter Jarbo" wrote:
>I've had the pleasure of thinking about digital archiving at work. I work
at
>a Neurophysiology dept at a hospital and we produce a lot of digital data
>and one of our great problems is how to properly archive every test we
>perform. The outcome of our intensive thinking :) would be Magneto-optical
>disks.
>They are really reliable, we have disks nearly ten years old that works
like
>a charm. They can be stored 50 years, or so they say. The disks are
>protected by a plastic case and they come in both 5 1/4" (5.2Gb) and 3 1/2"
>(1.3Gb). Of course not everyone has a reader, but I'm talking about
>archiving for your own purposes.
>The 3 1/2" drives are coming down in price. I think you could find a reader
>(USB) for US$300-350 today. Of course the disks are a bit on the expensive
>side (20-25$) but hey, you get what you pay for :)
For data archival, there are several things you probably really want to
consider:
1) media longevity.
2) future media readability.
3) data format readability.
Like you said, MO works on the longevity, but as they never were a popular
technology, and are less popular now, they loose on the future media
readibility front -- if you cannot replace a failed drive, then the data is
effectively lost. You don't mention anything about data format, but I've
seen some image formats come and go already (eg. Amiga IFF). The more
disused they become, the harder it will be to find tools that read them. If
you pick the wrong one, you'll have to copy the images to another in order
to keep them readable, and by that time, the task will be huge.
My pick is CD-Rs with JPEGs on them. Some CD-Rs are touted at surviving
100 years (?) under ideal storage conditions, so they meet media longevity.
The readers are everywhere, and the numbers of readers is still growing
(even new DVD drives still read them), so they meet the future media
readibility criteria. And with the ubiquity, and likely longevity, of web
browsers, which all read JPEG format images, that format seems the best
long-term choice.
Just a thought,
patbob ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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