Re: Dumb like a fox Backup Software?

"Soundhaspriority" wrote ...
"Richard Crowley"wrote ...
"Soundhaspriority" wrote...
That is correct. The fly height is so small, there is no room at all for a viscous layer. The surface is pure diamond.

That is all fine and well. But there are dozens of other things that can
(and DO) go wrong. Even hard drives that are powered up and
spinning fail. And those sitting inert on the shelf are even more prone
to failure.

I would like to see a link to the above assertion.

I shall post a photo of my stack of dead hard drives.
Or the barrels full of them back at the office.

Hard drives are NOT reliable enough for true "archive" application.
Virtually all of this planet's most valuable data is still archived on
digital mag tape.

You are correct that, individually, hard drives are not reliable enough. The failure rate is around 3% per year. The solution I suggested to Frank is a backup system with a human agent as an integral part. I performed a simple multiplication to compute the probability of a joint failure. The number is low, but it depends upon an efficient human agent to duplicate a drive as soon as it fails.

That makes the assumption that "fail" precludes the ability
to read the data. I'd like to see a link to THAT assertion.
By my definition "fail" means that you can't read data and
it is too late to duplicate at that point.

Frank was after something involving DVDs. The whole idea behind DVDs is that the human agent doesn't have to be nearly as vigilant. On the other hand, if two DVDs come out of the same batch, and they have an unexpectedly high fade rate, then when the human agent verifies them, there is a good chance both have failed.

I think my suggestion of replacing DVDs with multiple hard drives is valid. Tape is a different story. In the hands of professional archivists, tape is considered the gold standard. But would it really work for an individual? I have my own story about this. I recorded sound for a short film on about 12 DATs, using the HHB PortaDat, a 4 motor gold-standard field recorder. The tension loop of this recorder was so well designed, the makers reported that head replacements simply didn't occur.

Nothing is that "gold-standard". Particularly not any kind of helical-
scan small-scale format like DAT. Even a built-like-a-battleship Nagra
can go out of alignment.

.

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