This has been an interesting thread there seems to be no reliable long term storage for digital information. I sometimes wonder if all this magnificent Internet data is destined for oblivion, and the books will still he here centuries after.
Which I can still read in a few places, including even the 5 1/4" ones. They aren’t a good choice to start out with now, but if you entrusted them with your data 20 years ago, the inability to read floppies at all wouldn’t be the reason your data was irretrievable today (though the decay of individual floppies might be).
Somewhere on SDMB a little while ago people were talking about recovering decades old audio. It might be possible. Certainly, as one of the stepping stones, it would have worked.
Like I said, paper is an option, too…
Preserving data integrity depends on two things:
a) adequate redundancy
b) mean time between detection of integrity loss & restoration
Most data loss occurs because these two factors were not taken care of. The actual reliability rates of the media you’re storing it on is almost irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if you’re storing it on DVDs or Hard Drives or dilithium crystals if you’re storing it on a shelf. Unless you’re regularly verifying data integrity, the first time you’ll find out about data failure is when you want to restore.
Conversely, if you’re checking data integrity daily, it doesn’t matter if you’re storing them on 10 year old floppies, as soon as you detect data integrity loss, you restore from a redundant copy and resume operation.
I’ve finally set up a system that I think works well for fairly low cost. I set up an old PC with Windows Home Server, put two 1.5TB drives in it, and I use it as my file server.
Windows Home Server has a very nice feature - with one click, you can set up individual folders to be duplicated across two drives. This is the same as RAID mirroring, but you don’t have to mirror the entire drive - just the folders you care about. If you’re like me, you’ve got tons of files that you want to have on your server that you don’t really care about much - movies, MP3 rips of your audio collection, etc. If you use RAID mirroring, all this content gets backed up. But with WHS, you can leave all that stuff on a single drive, but mirror the folders that contain your documents, home photos and movies, etc.
Windows Home Server can be set up to automatically back up every client computer on your network on a schedule, and you can choose which folders get backed up. So I keep my critical documents on my machine, and they are automatically backed up every night to mirrored folders on WHS. I don’t have to do a thing.
For offsite backup, you can subscribe to an Online Backup Service like Carbonite. Set that up on Windows Home Server, and your own computer will never be tied up or slowed down while it transfers your files across the internet. And, to save bandwidth you can choose to only offline backup your most critical files.
A combination like that is an almost foolproof way to back up your critical information. Triple redundancy, and it’s all automated.
Frankly, it would be sufficient to just subscribe to an online backup service and set up a schedule to back up your files. But I like the flexibility of having Windows Home Server in the mix. I like that it can also be used as your home media server, a VPN gateway, and do other cool things to manage your home computers.
This discussion brings up an interesting question - what is a viable, high capacity, backup medium for the home / small office environment? Say you have a home server with 2 of the larger drives being sold today (1.5TB).
Tapes are still the best way to reliably back up data. The problem is the intial back up can take a heck of a long time and you have to back up daily, 'cause tape backs up in real time generally no short cuts.
You get a set of 14 tapes one for each day and a logical log tape and your set. Of course these professional back up systems are very expensive, you could be looking at $500 to $1,000 bucks or more depending on the amount of space you need
Key question: What’s your budget?
Sam’s right about offsite storage. Our problem is that with a home office and massive storage requirements the upload transfer speed means a full backup would take forever. We used Mozy for a while a few years ago, but paid the business rate for it. Quickly realized that for the annual cost (don’t know if it’s dropped since) we could buy all our equipment, have an increase in personal security (we hold the data) but at the cost of everything being located in one place.
Probably not good for an apartment setup where all equipment can be decimated in a fire or theft, but our office is on floor two, the backup server is in the basement. With two mirrored drives in each server (file and backup), we’re pretty set. Most NAS devices will send a warning email if a drive fails or starts to degrade.
I’d say that within a few years this kind of setup will be a couple hundred bucks at most.
Thats kinda what I was afraid of 
.
I think this is one of the key weakpoints in current tech. Tapes seem to be a good idea, but in the capacity I would have in my own personal server, I’d have to be looking at something like LTO3 or LTO4 which is several thousand dollars, and up.
I anticipate People’s data storage requirements will shoot through the roof in the next few years as digital cameras, hi def video cameras and the like continue to propagate.
Which, for the time being, brings it back to just rotating out HD’s as being the olny affordable practical solution. Not that it’s a good one…