I’ve got thousands of photos and dozens of hours of video of the kids.
Could I just remove the hard drive that the data is on and put in a safe deposit box for future generations to find?
Or,
What media would be the prefered way to archive things digital (but answer the above Q first if possible)?
First, let me tell you the right way to actually accomplish the goal. The right way is to have both a regular hard drive that stores the stuff and a backup media, preferably an external hard drive that you archive the collection on and store in a safe place life a safe deposit box.
Within every five years or so, you have to upgrade to newer, probably large, faster, and more reliable hard drives and move the data over. It isn’t that expensive and it does not take that long. You can keep the old ones as well so you always have plenty of backups. There is no risk to that plan and you can move to different archival storage mechanisms as they come available. Hollographc DVD type things that can hold over 200 movies on something like a DVD should be mainstream within 10 years, maybe a little less.
Now for a mental excercise, a regular hard drive might make it if it is stored in a very tightly climate controlled setting. The real risk is going to be finding something that can read the hard drive in 50 years. Do you know how long 50 years is in tech evolutionary time? Try hooking up some data storage thing from 1956 and reading it today.
Hard drives have a very low failure rate per hour of operation but nobody really knows how long a single one will last. The current life estimates on a hard drive make it sound like it should last 50 years but those estimates are deceiving. They mean that you would have to buy the same model every two years and transfer your data to hit near the mean time between failure rate.
Actually per Shagnasty’s point this is kind of an interesting question.
Check out this history of digital storage technique. What seems to be the uber standard today (even the CD) can in the dust bin tomorrow. It’s fascinating that even if we go back a mere 25 years ago our main (affordable) off line storage choices were floppy/parallel interface based tape drives and 5.25 & 3.5 disks, neither of which are all that reliable (in my experience) over long stretches of time.
Here’s an interesting history of digital storage methods from 1937 to the present.
Interestingly, despite the rapid advance of storage technology, the potential for obsolescence is probably smaller than the posts so far make it seem. To wit, while not standard anymore, 3.5 inch floppy drives still exist, and even finding a computer than can read a 5.25 inch floppy isn’t that tough (my dad probably has at least one). So that’s a storage medium that has lasted 30 years. Likewise, audio tapes, records, and CD’s are all still in use. Again, finding a record player is a bit tougher these days than it was 50 years ago, but is nowhere near impossible.
Most of the storage media that is now unreadable was never widespread and mass-produced, but rather limited to elite academics, researchers, or military. While far from a certainty, I would wager it’s far more likely than not that a standard hard drive from 2006 would still be readable in 2056.
Data format obsolescence.
You’d have to deal with the data format issue too.
Even assuming you can read the media, how will you find a program that can decode MP3s or DivX in 50 years? You may have to look in a museum for an iPod. (Anyone see the “iPod” in Doctor Who? 
) Who knows if GIF and JPEG will even still be remembered, let alone if there’ll be applications to decode them.
No doubt there will be PC/Macintosh emulators around then.
This guy seems to think that you will have lots of problems.
Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Data (Note: PDF file)
By then, there will be quantum computers that can solve an almost inifinite number of problems at once. They will be so powerful that we will only need like 5 for the whole world. There won’t be a home market at all because nobody needs computers like that at their house.
Give it a name like “Hot Busty Nurses.avi” and upload it to a P2P network.
It’ll still be there in 50 years.
There was an article about this kind of thing 20 years ago or so in the American Heritage Magazine of Technology and Invention. The US Government already has vast quantities of data stored on magnetic tape that isn’t retrievable back of changes in formatting and the like. I suspect that, as the above posts note, people are becoming more aware of the issue, and it may become less of an issue with time. But I think you’re better off transferring important suff every few years.
Yeah, that’s a pain. That’s why I like hard copy. I can still read data stored hundreds of years ago with ease. If my language interpreter were better, I cvould push that back thousands of years.
So, you are predicting that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them?
You’re much better off if you stash a computer with it.
Or maybe simply burn it in such a way that you can play it back on a portable DVD player with it’s own built in screen, then stash that DVD player with it.
What is possible is a 10- or perhaps 15-year solution; I have seen many hard-drives that are 12+ years old and tested out with no read or write errors. Take for example the current change of small computer storage interfaces we are right in the middle of: IDE is going out, and SATA is coming in, -but motherboards that supported both have been commonly available for at least 18 months now, and controller cards for operating IDE drives will probably be available for at least 2-3 years after many mobos no longer include IDE interfaces.
…My point is here that in a generic/standard interface, you generally will not see an instantaneous elimination of product support–crossover components will be available for at least a couple years. Up until early last year, I knew of a place that was selling (and moving!) refurb/tested 586-CPU computer parts and turnkey boxes. Not a lot, but still.
The way you are most likely to get an “instantly unsupported” product is if you are using a totally proprietary system, like Zip disks. If a business selling a proprietary solution went under just before a major operating system upgrade/change, you might only get limited future hardware support, if anything at all.
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Hard drives may be fairly stable in terms of preserving the data, but it can be hard to get the data off of them after newer encoding schemes are developed. My mom has a 20 MB MFM hard drive lying around that she can’t access. MFM was the first hard drive technology on PCs. They were “full height” drives, meaning that they took up the volume of 2 modern CD/DVD drives. Even 15 years ago when she first wanted to transfer the data off the old MFM hard drive, she couldn’t find a motherboard that would accomodate both an MFM controller card and an IDE interface card for a newer hard drive. Maybe if she scrounged up a bunch of computers of various generations and figured out how to network them together she could then get the data, but that’s a lot of time and money to spend. I know a guy who designs electronics for a living, and it’s possible he could create a custom controller card that would let a modern computer read an ancient hard drive, but again that would take a lot of time and money.
With memory becoming more standard as a storage method, it might actually be feasible, depending on how much data you want to perserve, to use some sort of Pocket PC with Several GB of RAM of some sort. This seems like a much more stable form of perserving data since it has all of the strengths of hard drives without the weaknesses of being mechanical, magnetic, and fragile.
answer 1: No.
answer 2: I have no idea.
Seriously, no one can know the answer to this question. Paper, especially acid-free paper, is hands down the most long-lasting storage medium available. Nothing else comes close. Mostly since paper is the only storage medium we have more than a couple of decades experience with. As for an informed guess on your question #1: the chances of the magnetic media retaining sufficient signal for fifty years seems very low to me. But since the media hasn’t been in existance for 50 years, noone can know for certain.
I’m pretty sure that words chisled into stone are far more durable than paper. On the other hand, there’s a minor problem with convenience.
No disrespect to your Mom, but that would have been a trivial task in 1991, and was faced by millions of people who made the transition from MFM to IDE while successfully porting their data files. The standard backup method at the time was the 1.44MB diskette, and even if her HD was 100% full of uncompressible files (very unlikely) it would only take 15 of them – certainly not unusual for a backup set in those pre-CDR days. Even if her old computer had been a 1981-era IBM PC, the 5.25" floppy was still common in 1991. Even nowadays, it wouldn’t take a “bunch of computers”: at most, two. MFM controllers are dirt cheap on eBay, and suitable motherboards are pretty easy to find. If your Mom still has the drive and really wants the data, it shouldn’t cost much at all to get it for her.
That would be overkill by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Might I point out, addressing Shagnasty’s idea, that placing any magnetic data storage media in a safe deposit box is a jim dandy way to guarantee that it will be partially gone in 3 years, and nearly if not totally wiped clean within 10.
I have never seen a modern safe deposit box that was not steel, surrounded by steel. The background magnetic fields inherent in sheet steel will degauss your storage drive faster than you can say Thomas Alva Edison.
A magnetic-field free, humidity-controlled environment? Might be nice. To be honest though, I side with the faction that says that you upgrade to current data storage as the new technology emerges.
Case in point- VHS players and tapes are being phased out. Simple fact. It is a major format shift from VHS to DVD. I’ve been recording all of my stuff over onto DVD. When the higher density blue laser ( or that other newfangled format fighting blue laser for dominance ) takes ahold, I suspect that for quite a while we may have dual-reading DVD machines. They can read and write in the new high density, but also will service our current DVD and CD data storage densities.
After that? Hell if I know. I DO know that if I can afford a computer, and backup hard drives, it is likely that I can afford to keep re-storing media.
What happens to that media when it is decompressed, transferred and recompressed every 10 years is for another thread.
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