TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
MJPerini wrote:
If you follow a real backup strategy 2 copies local 1 off site and one cloud you are very well protected.
M-disks are great but the weak link is how long readers will be available, although they are plentiful now , but CD's DVD's & Blue-Ray are already 'legacy media' . If you go that route be sure you buy a few well made readers.
Virtually every type of physical storage has not aged well.
M-Disc, makes a lot of sense to me and the world could use a widely adopted standard like that, but last I checked none of the really big digital content creators use them, because they produce too much data.
That doesn't mean they don't work, they do the question is how long.
If you follow a real backup strategy 2 copies loc... (
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Yes, that’s the problem. History shows that you need to migrate your data to new media every 20 years or so.
DirtFarmer
Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
therwol wrote:
M-Discs are said to have a 1000 year life...
Pure hype.
The maximum lifetime of any style of storage medium these days is probably less than 50 years. After that, the medium could be readable but the technology will have moved on so that you no longer can buy the readers/writers or update the drivers to new operating systems. How long did people use floppy disks? CDs/DVDs? Technology moving on will also mean that you will need larger capacity storage devices. The first home computers had less than a megabyte of storage. Now we're using Terabytes. What will we need in 50 years? (The M-discs are only around 100 Gbytes last I heard). 1000 years? What kind of data storage did they have in 1024? Printing wasn't even invented then.
Part of backup/archiving is Maintenance. That includes transferring your data to newer technology storage systems as they become available (and tested). It also includes verifying your data so it is not corrupted by the transfer.
TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
DirtFarmer wrote:
Pure hype.
The maximum lifetime of any style of storage medium these days is probably less than 50 years. After that, the medium could be readable but the technology will have moved on so that you no longer can buy the readers/writers or update the drivers to new operating systems. How long did people use floppy disks? CDs/DVDs? Technology moving on will also mean that you will need larger capacity storage devices. The first home computers had less than a megabyte of storage. Now we're using Terabytes. What will we need in 50 years? (The M-discs are only around 100 Gbytes last I heard). 1000 years? What kind of data storage did they have in 1024? Printing wasn't even invented then.
Part of backup/archiving is Maintenance. That includes transferring your data to newer technology storage systems as they become available (and tested). It also includes verifying your data so it is not corrupted by the transfer.
Pure hype. br br The maximum lifetime of any styl... (
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I agree the life is limited by the ability to read them. That projected lifetime number comes from extensive DOD testing. It’s no different from calculated MTBF numbers. Last I looked, the MTBF of a typical enterprise spinning drive is in excess of 1 million hours (!)
DirtFarmer
Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
TriX wrote:
... the MTBF of a typical enterprise spinning drive is in excess of 1 million hours (!)
About 114 years
@ around 8765 hours/year (24 * 365.2425)
therwol wrote:
M-Discs are said to have a 1000 year life. They c... (
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ExFAT IS cross-platform compatible, but it is very dangerous. If you unplug the drive when it is mounted with open files , there is an EXTREMELY high likelihood you will lose data. I know this from personal experience. Fortunately, I had a double backup.
If you are going to add to your collection of personal photos, I wouldn't limit my external drive to 400GB or even 1TB.
I went to three 8TB drives. One is the master and the other two are copies. One can go to your bank safety deposit box and the other two can be on your desk. Then process your little heart out.
I purchased Western Digital externals and I'm very happy with them. I replace them between 4 and 7 years old. (I'm just that way. I also change out all of my electrical surge protectors every 2-3 years. No I don't have a ton of money, but I value the experiences documented through my photos more than money. It seems that every year memory gets cheaper and it makes sense to have more capacity than needed.)
burkphoto wrote:
ExFAT IS cross-platform compatible, but it is very dangerous. If you unplug the drive when it is mounted with open files , there is an EXTREMELY high likelihood you will lose data. I know this from personal experience. Fortunately, I had a double backup.
I was not aware of the danger with exFAT. The OP uses a Mac. I thought that cross platform compatibility would be desirable. I have sent gigs of family photos to my daughter on external hard drives formatted exFAT. She uses a Mac. So far no problems, but I'll warn her.
therwol wrote:
I was not aware of the danger with exFAT. The OP uses a Mac. I thought that cross platform compatibility would be desirable. I have sent gigs of family photos to my daughter on external hard drives formatted exFAT. She uses a Mac. So far no problems, but I'll warn her.
I still use ExFAT when needed, but I have a big note taped to my hub cable that says, UNMOUNT DRIVES! It's important, since I use a MacBook Air for everything.
TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
Flyerace wrote:
If you are going to add to your collection of personal photos, I wouldn't limit my external drive to 400GB or even 1TB.
I went to three 8TB drives. One is the master and the other two are copies. One can go to your bank safety deposit box and the other two can be on your desk. Then process your little heart out.
I purchased Western Digital externals and I'm very happy with them. I replace them between 4 and 7 years old. (I'm just that way. I also change out all of my electrical surge protectors every 2-3 years. No I don't have a ton of money, but I value the experiences documented through my photos more than money. It seems that every year memory gets cheaper and it makes sense to have more capacity than needed.)
If you are going to add to your collection of pers... (
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You’re right about both the drives and the surge protectors. Most household surge protectors use MOVs, which have a limited life. Every time they take a hit, they are degraded, until they become useless, and if they’re hit with continuous voltage outside their capacity, they’re destroyed.
bwana
Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada
wiz302pa wrote:
I need some advice as to what hardware to acquire to provide a viable long-term, external photo file storage solution. To date I have relied on my 1Tb Mac hard drive, but ..... is it time for a change.
I am not a professional and never will be, but I do enjoy this "sport" and hope to stay active with it.
Type/size of external drive?
Any Adobe Lightroom-specific considerations other than the need for a reasonable data transfer to/from speeds?
I use an external storage device called
Wavlink which allows me to easily use any existing unhoused HD or SSD for backup or standalone cloning. Works like a charm for any of my numerous 1TB thru 12TB drives.
bwa
DirtFarmer wrote:
Pure hype.
The maximum lifetime of any style of storage medium these days is probably less than 50 years. After that, the medium could be readable but the technology will have moved on so that you no longer can buy the readers/writers or update the drivers to new operating systems. How long did people use floppy disks? CDs/DVDs? Technology moving on will also mean that you will need larger capacity storage devices. The first home computers had less than a megabyte of storage. Now we're using Terabytes. What will we need in 50 years? (The M-discs are only around 100 Gbytes last I heard). 1000 years? What kind of data storage did they have in 1024? Printing wasn't even invented then.
Part of backup/archiving is Maintenance. That includes transferring your data to newer technology storage systems as they become available (and tested). It also includes verifying your data so it is not corrupted by the transfer.
Pure hype. br br The maximum lifetime of any styl... (
show quote)
The 1000 year longevity of M-Discs only refers to the media. Everything you say is true, but to a few people, that's what matters now. Yes, we went from punch cards to paper tape to magnetic tape to big floppies to little floppies to various flavors of hard drives along the way to the current ones. We have cloud storage. Operating systems have changed. We can only know what we know now and use our best judgement. It is inevitible that new technology and protocols will come along. One thing for certain is that if you have a reader, your data on M-Discs will be intact for your lifetime. If you must know, I've only used M-Discs to archive rare movies I've come across. I don't use them to archive files. I'm comfortable with triple backing up my files with one copy offsite and my most important files in the cloud. It's a judgement call.
Just a brief story. When floppies were king, I put a lot of files on them. Most of them are of no value to me now, but when I tried to view them to decide what to keep, about half of the floppies couldn't be read. Longevity can matter.
therwol wrote:
Just a brief story. When floppies were king, I put a lot of files on them. Most of them are of no value to me now, but when I tried to view them to decide what to keep, about half of the floppies couldn't be read. Longevity can matter.
The floppies and any magnetic tape will degrade because the particles will move out of alignment due to "relaxation" of the polymer matrix in which the particles are embedded. That's why old VHS tapes, even when not played, turn crappy (sorry about technical terms:) Ditto cassette tapes.
DirtFarmer
Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
therwol wrote:
... we went from punch cards to paper tape to magnetic tape to big floppies to little floppies to various flavors of hard drives along the way to the current ones...
Actually, the longest used storage medium seems to be punch cards. They were invented in 1801 to control Jacquard looms in textile factories. They were used in their most familiar form for data sorting by businesses in the early 1900s. We used them in the late '60s for computer programs. Maybe a bit in the early '70s, but that's probably about it.
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