Two Stop Bits | Imo the tapes are best long term storage medium. You can easly get around 25 yea...

Borg 54 days ago | parent

Imo the tapes are best long term storage medium. You can easly get around 25 years of storage from a tape. Unfortunately streamers are expensive and hard to use. I always toyed about buying a streamer for my data... Ended up hoarding HDDs...

But if we speak about 100s of years.. Hmmm, unsolved stuff..

bmonkey325 54 days ago
And you have to preserve the mechanism that wrote the tape. Eg. LTO-8 drives can read LTO-7 and LTO-8 tape, but not LTO-6 tape.
I have a complicated relationship with LTO, QIC and QIC mini. Mostly it works but it senses fear like printers …
- Borg 53 days ago
  Right... You basically need to move data too to newer format.. Ill stay with my HDDs ;) (for now).
  - bmonkey325 53 days ago
    For hard drives that are powered off for a long time "stiction" is a real concern. Yes I know, parked heads and all that, but powered off HDs for many years with varying temps/humidity gives my nether region a pucker thinking of the data loss
    - Borg 53 days ago
      Yeah.. I store them at home, so temp is 23-28 deg. Usually in those plastic little boxes there were sold in. I know they will eventually fail. I just do NOT have cheap reliable option to store backups. Those disks are leftover of upgrades, like.. 20GB, 120GB, 320GB, 1TB :) Some are reused in cheap USB ext cases that have IDE/SATA connectors.