Probably need to know the timeframe. As I recall, optical media does degrade, but its measured in 10's or 100's of years. Likely long after the format has been abandoned, making the longevity not the real problem.
Flash degrades when its not regularly powered after a few years (<10). Disk suffers from similar problems to optical. The longevity of the disk is unlikely to be the problem, but the format of the media, and or interconnect will likely be difficult to deal with 10+yrs out. Tape will suffer from the physical problems. You can use something like tar to handle the formatting. Even if we stop using tar, its not that difficult to deconstruct the format, since its just a concatenation of files. I'm not aware of anybody who is actively working on this kind of problem, nor anybody who has a solution to it. The best thing I've been able to offer people is: archive on disk, every 5 yrs, ensure that all disks are a) readable, b) data is verified. If there are issues with either computers being able to read the formats, or physically connect, migrate the data to new devices and reset the clock. Could you get away with >5yrs? In some cases, probably. It does seem to be fairly reasonable for a middle ground, giving time on either side of a hardware/software change to allow migration before its difficult to find equipment. > On Aug 27, 2018, at 3:15 PM, Dick Steffens <d...@dicksteffens.com> wrote: > > What are the current preferences for long term, off line storage of photo > files? (At this point I don't know how many, or how large the files are.) > > Are thumb drives good for that? > > I recall reading several years ago that CD/DVD disks degrade over time. Is > that still true? > > What other alternatives are there? > > -- > Regards, > > Dick Steffens > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug -- Louis Kowolowski lou...@cryptomonkeys.org Cryptomonkeys: http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/ Making life more interesting for people since 1977 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
