What is the safest archive media ?

I've been using DVDs and an external hard drive for years, the hard drive crashed a few months ago and I lost all the data it contained
I started storing my photos etc. in a dropbox, which I can also access with my phone.

All boards I can think of where affected including Apple ...... Possibly if they still made any in the US (Supermicro? ) they may have been OK if they used US made caps?

That's why you usually see on the box of new boards something along the lines of "Solid Japanese Made Capacitors used thoughout"

I've bought about 6 boards with ISA Slots off Ebay and replaced caps on two of them, but all eventually packed in. I have about 4 Tape Drives with backups going back to 1999 when I bought my first digicam. I might as well just throw them away

The caps problem also effected a lot of other elecrical goods such as monitors, TV's, recorders etc.

I had to scrap TWO Panasonic HDD TV Recorders due to bad caps
This site shows how they can be fixed.

Note in the 20th post down a picture of a fake Chinese Capacitor
In this case the cap inside the other is actually a good make

This might be of interest

http://millenniata.com/

DVD's that last 1000 years.

Hmm yes. How exactly have they tested this. Did King Ethelred back up his iTunes account to one?

I've got 4TB of data backed up. Being on ADSL the upload speed is 10 times slower than the download speed. I daren't even calculate how long it would take to upload 4TB of data to a 'Cloud' - never mind how much it would coost to stire it

hehe


Advertisements never lie do they?

Quite. And that's not even anticipating the horrible moment when we are told the service is closing and we have 30 days to retrieve our data.

I have 2TB backed up on line. So far I haven't had a problem. Whenever I have retrieved a file (usually because I'm at work) it has been stored there safely.

I do have a decent upload speed of about 10-20mbs. The first upload does take a while but after that it's fine and just happens in the background.

I doubt very much that in my lifetime these services will cease to be. And as they are a backup of a backup of a backup for me, I will be fine - unless the service closes whilst my house and office are both on fire!

Maybe not, but an individual service might cease to be and it's actually already happened.

I can't remember who it was, but someone went bust and there was a mad scramble to download the files people wanted to keep, resulting of course in the site crashing completely.

It depends what the archive is for, but I don't feel happy that it's for any important backup.

Hi all,

I've seen nothing to indicate that Flash memory is proven reliable in storage (including compact flash). SSD drives in laptops for example have to have a write algorithm that moves around the chip to avoid repeat writes that will eventually fail. Time will tell how reliable hey prove to be.

At least a 'smart' hard drive should give you warning it is likely to fail. The free 'Belarc Advisor' for example will tell you if all your drives are showing 'healthy'.

The cloud idea works with the industry principal that if saved data isn't in three places at once (including off site in fireproof safe) it isn't secure.

As to burning to discs I doubt many of us have pro media and writers to be very sure. Keeping discs dry, away from heat and out of sunlight seems to be as important as most ideas. i've certainly had to bin some old back up CD's as useless.

I think we'll be unsure of all this for a very long time.

IOW there's no foolproof method.