Reliable storage medium?

[MarkS]

Good Day Endgame people,

I was just mulling around the crazy idea of putting all the Sixes on DVD's simply as a reliable backup. Yeah, I know... Crazy. But just thinking about it, it would take 267 or so single-sided and single-layer discs (red lasers). But let's just say it was done using good quality media, like those Toshi Yuden (spelling?) disks that alot of people say are the best. How long would they last, given cool storage conditions?

On the other hand, it would be a lot easier to buy an extra 1.5 TB drive and use that as a backup. However, I have heard somewhere that using a hard drive for a backup isn't extremely reliable, since hard drives have wear and tear simply by using them. I have a question about this.

What if you had a hard drive used *only* for backup. That is you burn your tablebases to it once, and you pack the thing away in an anti-static bag, keep it cool, and take better care of it than your heart and diet. Would the data on the hard drive be expected to last about as long as a burned DVD? Or a bit less?

Mark

[kb2ct]

The answer is sharing.

Most gardeners don't hesitate to give unusual plants away because it they lose the original, they can get it back from the people they gave it to.

The enemy of hard drives is heat. I buy hard drives in pairs and back files up on drives not plugged in. Data is seldom lost, but retrieving it is expensive. Retrieval and clean room fees are on a corporate scale. Maybe $1500. Much cheaper to buy your drives in pairs and share.

[Kirill Kryukov]

To make the complete backup of Nalimov 6-men tablebases on DVD disks is very expensive. How expensive - depends on how much you value your time. I guess that even double backup using two hard drives of 1.5 TB each is cheaper than single backup on DVD.

As for reliability - I would go with the hard drive too. Because you can plug it to a computer every year or so and verify the files - it will take some time, but it's totally automatic. With DVD, on the other hand, it would require one week of swapping the disks.