[Coco] CF and SD life expectancy

[Steven Hirsch]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2011, Mark McDougall wrote:

> I have CDs burned less than 10 years ago that I can't read. I have DVDs 
> burned less than 5 years ago that I can't read. I have a spindle of DVDs that 
> I bought about 2 years ago that mostly won't burn at all.

Same here.

> I'd *never* trust any archival function to optical media atm. I'm really 
> hanging on some sort of 100% reliable, permanent archival medium, because 
> even backing up to two HDD still makes me nervous! :(

My favorite:  LTO tape.  Fast and incredibly reliable.

I'm not sure I even trust RAID 5 anymore.  I recently had one drive in an 
array fail on my Linux workstation, followed quickly by a second during 
the rebuild!  As the capacity of drives gets larger, the chances of this 
happening increase.  Fortunately, I had a recent tape backup and didn't 
lose anything critical.

Steve



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