On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 01:42:08AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Steve Fosdick wrote:
The hazard with hard disks is that having such high capacity, on the rare occasions they do fail the effect is so much more significant which, of course, is why you want a backup copy in the first place.
The issue with hard disks is that they don't cope with offline storage very well. There are a variety of issues that will effect hard drives that only happen if the drive is left stored for long periods without power.
Generally though all my 'backup' data stays on line, disk capacity increases as technology advances and provides the extra space required.
E.g. my new garage backup system will be 2Tb compared with the old one's 750Gb.
[snip]
Another issue I have just recently discovered is I have a couple of drives from circa '92 that had some data on I wouldn't mind looking at again (mostly out of morbid curiosity at old college work etc) and I have found that I can't even get a drive controller to talk to them. They spin up, these are IDE but pre "auto" setup and I don't have the bios magic (sector count etc) that they were formatted to. I'm sure that isn't insurmountable given time and effort so they have been put aside for a rainy day.
A classic example, I expect those disks are only a few hundred Mb and the data would fit on your existing system's disk (or backup) without you even noticing it.
Most backups are for security of *current* data rather than archive purposes aren't they? Any 'historic' data that I want to keep (e.g. photographs) I also want available live on my current system so all I need to do to keep it safe as well is to backup my current system.
Does anyone (here) actually keep old data off line? My company accounts etc. are so small (in disk space terms) that they just stay on the current system right back to 1987.