Long term storage (HDDs and data tape - why both?)

[Richard Crowley]

The odds of all three drives failing are EXCELLENT if they are all the same make, model, capacity, and from the same manufacturing batch if something went wrong with that batch. This has happened often enough to make very many of us very skeptical of using the same brand of drive as ANY kind of a "backup".

For that matter 99.8% of all the most valuable (and mundane, for that matter) data on this planet is backed up AND archived (two separate functions) on digital magnetic tape. Nobody I know considers hard drives (especially the mechanical rotating kind) to be ANY sort of "archival" medium. Absolutely not. Not even close.

[Alfred001]

Originally Posted by rcrowley

The odds of all three drives failing are EXCELLENT if they are all the same make, model, capacity, and from the same manufacturing batch if something went wrong with that batch. This has happened often enough to make very many of us very skeptical of using the same brand of drive as ANY kind of a "backup".

For that matter 99.8% of all the most valuable (and mundane, for that matter) data on this planet is backed up AND archived (two separate functions) on digital magnetic tape. Nobody I know considers hard drives (especially the mechanical rotating kind) to be ANY sort of "archival" medium. Absolutely not. Not even close.

Ok, sure, if they are of the same batch and there was something wrong with that batch, but what if they weren't. Say they were even from different manufacturers.

[Richard Crowley]

Hard drives are very finicky mechanisms. They frequently fail to "reboot" after sitting on the shelf for years (or even months). I have a stack of dead hard drives I can send you as an object lesson for your class. Repeating: Hard drives are ABSOLUTELY NOT any kind of "archival" medium. OTOH digital mag tape has almost no failure mechanisms. Data has been recovered from mag tape many decades old. No hard drive would have survived that long. It is not even debatable.

[enginefire]

Also if you are transporting the disks back and forth from your source or studio and back to your offsite locations the risk of damaging the hard drives increases greatly. Tapes are much more durable when moving them offsite and also less prone to mechanical failure when over writing data week after week.

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