Steve, I am totally dubious about this as well and I am not suggesting that
you take a drive and put it on the shelf for a year.
What I'm saying is that you have enough storage in your online, redundant,
managed, and verified store to hold the content of your archive.
To my way of thinking, the only other alternative for large archives today
is LTO tape.
Both will require migration of the content from drive to drive or tape to
tape over time.
This is an IT data management question and must be seen and addressed in
that context. It is no longer doing something and putting it on the shelf
for 15 years. It becomes active management. The model has changed and if we
don't change with it, there will be very unhappy people.
As Scott said earlier, it's a shame that we all need to become IT
professionals, but that is, I fear, indeed the case. Now, I need to go back
to rearranging my online storage systems.
Cheers,
Richard
At 11:36 AM 2/23/2005, Steven Smolian wrote:
My original comments concerning using external hard drives for long-term
storage still hold. All responses here seemed about frequent short-term
usage. How will they work after not being used for, say, 15 years, a not
unusual period of time between placing audio into an archive and
bringing it
out for retrieval. I'm still dubious indeed.
Anyone have experience firing up a computer after a 15 year period of
inactivity?
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Vignettes
Media web: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX