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Issue #238 May 2010
Electronic Alzheimer’s
by Steve Ciarcia
It certainly isn’t a beach in the Bahamas down here at the cottage, but short sleeve shirts and tiki bars forever eradicate unpleasant memories of freezing in Connecticut. I only mention this because one of the other things I did down here this winter was go to an open-air Moody Blues concert. OK, perhaps there were only three people under the age of 50 in the 4,500-plus audience, but it definitely got me thinking about my collection of hundreds of CDs and videotapes and their ages too.
At the post-concert party, I wanted to play one of my Moody Blues video favorites—A Night at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (Polydor Records, 1993)—until I remembered that the only copies I had of it were on Laser Disk and VHS tape. The Laser Disk player bit the dust a decade ago, and I no longer had a VHS player at the cottage. There’s nothing worse than a high-tech guy being subverted by technical progress.
Rather than laud the fact that paper seems to last a thousand years and photographic negatives more than a hundred, perhaps we need to ask ourselves more about how we survive the fact that with each evolution in current technology we seem to have less and less long-term data integrity. ;-) Bits don’t have expiration dates, but data memory can only endure forever if the media and file formats remain coherent and discernable. The hardware that breaks down or goes obsolete, the software formats that go extinct, and the online presence (think “cloud”) that suddenly vanishes one afternoon is hardly confidence-inspiring.
Presuming you are willing to periodically refresh or convert everything you own to the prevailing format (analog to MP3, HD to Blue-ray, MPEG2 to MPEG4, floppy to flash, etc, etc) and store it on a prevailing compatible medium, you might have a prayer of saving stuff for the long haul. Of course, deciding which medium is a whole ’nother problem.
Opinions vary on the longevity of optical CDs and DVDs. Basically, the bargain optical disks you burn yourself may not last because of the crappy quality of the dye and glue used between the layers. (You find out whether you burned good ones [10 years] or bad ones [two years] the hard way.) Commercial CDs and DVDs are said to last 10 to 25 years, but they may have quality-control issues too.
An alternative to optical storage these days seems to be flash memory. The dollar-to-MB ratio is still very steep, but they do have advantages. Unfortunately, getting reliable statistics or informed opinions about long-term data retention is difficult. I always thought that unpowered flash could sit on the shelf for 10 years and still work, but some suggest it is considerably less. The confusing part of finding the truth is that most flash lifespan statistics are about using smart wear-leveling and powered HDD-like applications, not load-and-unplug-it data storage.
Professionals who know better say that magnetic tape is still the best long-term storage medium, but few of us have tape drives hanging around at home. At $100/TB, the most cost-effective, high-volume magnetic storage medium is still the HDD. Keeping a HDD offline might retain data considerably longer, but powered and spinning is the determining factor for its real lifetime. Unfortunately, even on this statistic, it is hard to get a consistent, let alone straight, answer about lifespan. I read that Google suggested four years, but others have said it is two or less. Compare that with your own experience. I’ve had hard drives running for 10 years that are still going strong and others that barely lasted one. It’s all about the bearings apparently.
So, even if you convert all your files and formats to lessen hardware obsolesce, it’s still a Catch-22 on where you save the new data files. Certainly, the promise of the cloud beckons some trusting souls. After all, who doesn’t want someone with deeper pockets replacing HDDs every three to four years so we always have reliable data access? The jeopardy here is control. What happens if Google pulls the plug on YouTube or Yahoo shuts off Flickr? Got copies of your videos and photos?
While there are things like 1,000-year carbon nanotube and diamond memories someplace in the development stream, we all have to make relevant data storage decisions today using current technology. Odds are we’ll all do it differently because there are so many variables; but, whatever the technique, success will be assured if we “LOC step” together—Lots Of Copies.
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