Technology

59204 readers

3249 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

470

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kerrigan778@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Do optical disks degrade if protected from the elements? A stack of Blu-ray disks could store quite a bit.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The commonly used optical disk technologies degrade over time. CD-RW more rapidly than CDR. It's even worse for higher-density media.

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

And for bigger data sets, the capacity isn't there. And writable media is getting more rare. Probably because of the same reason.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Depends on the disk technologies.

CDs are prone to flaking, otherwise most disk are suspectible of oxidation (disk rot) if stored improperly. M-Disk is a long-life variant of both DVDs and Blu-Rays, although more expensive. However, write-once disks are very ransomware-resilient, and I recommend to add a write-once media to any proper backup setup.