The Thing About Digital Media Storage

[grayestofghosts]

Kind of learning that the thing about digital media storage is that when it comes to the widely used formats now (hard drives, SSD, flash), we at best don't know how long they will actually store for, or likely they only last about 10 years or so, and the reason why the average consumer doesn't notice this is only because of the pace of consumer electronics updates forcing buying new devices and offloading a lot of data storage onto professional services elsewhere that takes care of backups and replacing corrupted storage.

Like I'm not sure if people understand how wacky this actually is. Like imagine if you have a book on your shelf that you haven't touched in ten years, and you decide to grab it and you can't even open it. Like what the fuck, who came up with this system.

Comments

[axolotls]

I think it's also how well people take care of them in part. External hard drives in particular fail more often than internal ones because of exposure to bumps and falls and I think in general people often treat them as hardier than they are. YMMV definitely; I've never had a hard drive fail on me, still using the first one I got that's about 13 years old now, but I hear about people losing all their data every now and then due to a failure (that must suck!). (Some of it may also be quality, I've heard some say that certain companies produce worse hardware.)

[grayestofghosts]

I mean this in kind of the opposite way. Like we know bumping is bad for hard drives especially, we can generally know how many writes something takes until failure because we have servers that are constantly writing all the time so we can count.

The problem is more bit rot -- it's actually hard to say how long a piece of storage media will last if it sits on a shelf and is not used. The electrical or magnetic charge slowly decays and using the media resets it... but how long will it stick around if you don't? There are measures we do to keep improving but it seems like the best we have are estimates of decades for the better ones.

Which is striking, because a lot of paper and pens will advertise themselves as "archival" and "acid-free" like it's not a big deal... we expect so much more from it.

But yeah I have had a hard drive fail on me, probably mostly due to bumps. It convinced me to switch to an SSD, and now I'm learning about new problems.

[axolotls]

Oh yeah. I think refreshing the data every two or so years is recommended, which is pretty easy with modern hard drives apparently as they'll do it automatically if powered on, so just plugging it in for a bit should do the trick? But it's a way more active form of archival than paper, yeah!