On 9/21/18 9:47 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 6:08 PM Ed Greshko ed.greshko@greshko.com wrote:
On 9/21/18 7:42 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 2:47 PM Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
That is true, but there is also a reasonable chance or losing them, breaking them, or other random failures. When a flash drive dies, it's gone, very difficult to recover if even possible. I would not recommend a flash drive (or DVD) alone for long-term storage.
All CD and DVD consumer burnable (R or RW) are not suitable for long term storage. The dyes used are not gonna very long, maybe a few years. If they're kept in the dark at stable temperature, I'd be surprised if they lasted 5 years. Bluray is a different story, and with proper storage shows some promise of being readable for quite a while, but you're gonna have to put a drive, cables, and a computer into cold storage along with the discs so... good luck.
FWIW, I think I must be very lucky. I have just checked several of my TDK DVD-RW disks that were written between 2003 and 2005. I'd forgotten all about them until reading this. They've been sitting on the top of a cabinet that is exposed to indirect sunlight and temp ranges of between the 60's and 80's and high humidity. (I fight with my wife about the A/C in the summer).
All of them read just fine. Which is good since I'd been looking for the photos of one of our departed cats which were "lost" due to an HD failure.
Yes, lucky. Make copies, quick!
Well, since I did forget about them and it has been 15 years (3X your upper end estimate) I don't think they are that important. I'll check them again in another 15 years. If I have a DVD drive at that time. :-)