It gets even more scary: So you back up all your data to disks? Sure, they're pretty cheap and you can buy a terabyte for fifty bucks, but guess what the firmware for those drives is stored on. Hope the flash they used wasn't cheap (but if it's a consumer drive and it cost you fifty bucks, it probably was).
For long life I'm betting on DVDs (refreshed every few years). Easily half of the 15 year old drives I've been keeping are now bad; copying them forward every few years is a good idea. It might be time to go back to tape, but it's expensive. Pretty much everything sucks at retention.
For long life I'm betting on DVDs (refreshed every few years). Easily half of the 15 year old drives I've been keeping are now bad; copying them forward every few years is a good idea. It might be time to go back to tape, but it's expensive. Pretty much everything sucks at retention.