Figured I'd share this and post it here vs computer news since the article is almost 6 months old and not latest news. Came across it when digging into information on the future of optical storage. A short while back Sony stated that they are pulling out of the optical storage drive market. And I was curious as to if any other companies stepped up to the plate to take optical storage further or if it has a doomed future due to the cloud.
I'm not sure I understand this. Sony has been part of the working group, but it hasn't been the only company. My understanding is the standards are part of a corporate group effort by Sony,Phillips, and possibly a few other companies. Sony isn't a one-man band, here.
I personally like storing my data locally and having control over it. Even though I have some free cloud space online through google and amazon etc, I dont use it.
me too! 'Cloud Storage' is a bit of a silly term when it could just be called "Stored on another person's computer" while also showing the risks you take with that approach.
I also like to store my data in a manner that protects it over time, such as I have had to migrate floppies to CD-R's, then migrate CD-R's to DVD-R's, and only storing long term on DVD-R's is where I am at now, and I haven't made the leap to Blu-Ray storage because the media is still costly for 25GB storage per disc and storing 5 DVD-R's to a single-sided Blu-Ray is not that appealing, so I have stuck with 4.7GB per disc. Looking into Holographic Storage with 1.6TB of storage as of 2010 would be so sweet if it was affordable.
Not to trivialize your point here, but I cannot see how you would create that much data. The only thing I can think of is this is some sort of backup archival storage system? In which case I'm forced to wonder- aloud- whether the data on your floppy disks really needs to be switched over or whether it's obsolete? What I mean is- can you think of when you might ever need that SiS Virge Windows 3.1 Video Driver, type deal.
I have my data on a large external hard drive, but I treat it as a single point of failure, all eggs in one basket approach to ease of access long term mass storage and not write protected from infections like optical storage, and susceptable to many weaknesses. All critical data that is also stored on this external is also burned to DVD-R's just in case the external drive should ever fail.
Again, my main question here is not how you should store this information, but rather culling out what you don't need. Your storage issues seem to stem from a sort of "packrat" attitude. One I can 100% understand, because I have it myself. It seems when I decide to delete a folder or files it doesn't take long for me to realize that I needed them.
Back when I got my first optical writable drive, a CD-R drive, I had stacks of floppies with up to 720k or 1.44MB per disk, and being able to get rid of hundreds of floppies (literally able to sqeeze (451) floppies or more per CD-R disc )and burn a CD with all the data on it was so sweet. I drilled holes through stacks of floppies and threw out a 30 gallon trash bag full of them 13 years ago. These days I am looking for a similar storage leap in which potentially (340) DVD-R's can be squeezed onto a single 1.6TB Holographic Disc.
Tape Drives. Some high capacity Tape Drives go up to 20GB and 40GB.
Most people would be happy with just buying a 3TB external hard drive, and maybe buy two of them a master and slave to perform backups to, since how often would both fail to create a total data loss. But I like optical storage in that its protected from infections and other threats by design.
Backup systems are best done in layers. Then the issue is stale data. To me though it really sounds like you are backing up stuff you just don't need to backup. This might be heavily weighted by my own preferences, but this is my strategy:
I try to only ever backup things I created. Things like my Wallpapers (125 or so at this point, constituting over 100GB of Photoshop files...
) My APplication Source code, and pretty much only the things I created. Some specific things other people backup that I don't:
The Operating System. That is, a lot of people suggest creating Disk Images on a regular basis. I can understand that- the purpose being that you can easily be back in the game after a disaster. My approach is to use PowerArchiver's (Archiving program, paid, but totally awesome) in-built backup script to zip up my important Source-code folders into a 7-zip file, which get's stored on my second hard drive. When the drive storage get's into the red, I burn the latest archives from the backup folder (as many as can fit, usually 4) to a DVD-R drive, and delete the rest.
Arguably I don't even need to back them up, since most of them have remote repositories on github or elsewhere, which is also why I have no problem erasing older backups. For example if I decide "hmm, I kind of like the implementation I used last week" I can just grab the appropriate source from the repository history.
of course that is VERY specific, and the main reason I don't backup more is simply because there is too much data I would have to backup, and not enoguh time or space to put it all and keep it fresh- my 750GB as well as my 1.5TB are both +90% full, and that is after moving a lot of data to my smaller External Drives. So I prioritize: I know from experience it's a lot faster to reinstall an OS, redownload an application, or set application preferences than it is to rewrite software from the ground up, so I do my best to avoid that scenario. I have had some awesome failures at that, like my attempt to refresh my remote git repository resulting in me deleting everything I had done in the past week (Windows Volume Shadow Copy to the rescue!)
You can have two 3TB external drives and connect one and get it infected and then connect the other and infect the pair, then depending on the nature of the virus you could be lucky in just scanning a drive that still works and cleaning it or dealing with two drives that no longer read and of which the partition tables are trashed etc.
You are VASTLY overestimating what malware is currently capable of. The worst I can see happening is a File Infector infecting the Executables stored on that drive. Malware that spreads to external drives is usually doing that to try to spread- by corrupting the Partition table or other things like that it simply prevents itself from spreading successfully, which sort of defeats the purpose. Nonetheless, your purpose here is OK- it's just a layered backup, which you want in case your primary backup is corrupted or broken for any reason. Malware corruption is far less likely than a standard Hard drive failure, but since the actions should protect from either situation it's still a good approach.
The other feature of optical storage I like is the simplicity of it. The data is on an optical disc which can be inserted into another optical drive that is compatible to access the data.
A standard HDD has platters (discs) that are bound to the surrounding mechanicals and electronics and are not easily transferrable to another drive without data loss.
Hard Drives are easily installed into enclosures or other Systems, though.
SSD's are great, but you then have all the data on the drive bound to trusting that a chip will not fail. Chips are sensitive to Aging and falling out of tolerance, Static Discharge, Solar Flares, and EMP's. I feel its only a matter of time before the earth is struck with a solar flare that proves that smaller more complex, and denser electronic design is not always better and makes the devices more sensitive to such a threat for data loss and cooked chips. I own three SSD drives and they are NOT for long term storage, they are for SPEED!
the Flash Storage on a SSD drive Is susceptible to EMP. This also why they generally have shielding that creates a faraday cage around the drive, protecting it from any EMP interference; otherwise you could set all the bits of a SSD drive to 1 by holding it above your head while underneath a power line. Magnetic Platter drives are probably more sensitive to Electromagnetic discharge, simply because our Magnetic drives are not inside a faraday cage like construction. This is just a guess, of course. My point is I doubt either one is more susceptible to the behaviour. Honestly I think you have worse "opponents" to your backup strategy than Solar Flares and Malware. The big one being just everyday Hard Drive failure, or things as simple as user error.
