[Leica] WAS: Nathan's PAW 31: NOW: Digital ARCHIVING

[feli at creocollective.com (Feli di Giorgio)]

Probably the safest way to archive things these days is with additional
hard drives. I plan on building a "mirrored" disk array, somewhere between
500-1024GB big. A mirrored array contains an even amount of drives of equal
capacity. Basically for every drive in the array there is an duplicate, so 
that
if one drive crashes, you can recover the data from it's twin. I'm pretty 
sure
you could go to your local PCClub store and have something like this build
rather cheaply.

For the most part CD's are highly unstable. I have had cheap ones fail after 
only 2 years, even though they were properly stored. I do not have any more 
hope
for DVDs and tapes are a whole different mess, because manufacturers keep 
changing
formats every few years and you can end up with an orphaned system that is no
longer supported.

Feli