RE: [AV Media Matters] Let's just get rid of tape and optical mediaentirely

[James Lindner <jim@vidipax.com>]

Charles Repka wrote:
>Jim
>
>I'm surprised.  You of all people.  To advocate a specific mechanism
>and method archiving data.  You, sitting on a virtual museum of old,
>obsolete media formats.  Yes, the cost of hard drives will continue
>to come down and become competitive with other storage media.  But a
>hard  drive is just another media.  It is just a bunch of spinning
>magnetic discs.  We are rapidly approaching the packing limits  that
>can be achieved with magnetic media.  And it will most likely be
>replace by some form of quantum mechanism ( I'm serious)  And what
>makes you think that you will still have the proper computer
>interface to retrieve the data stored on your stack of hard drives,
>20, 30 or 50 years from now?  Assuming they're still functional that
>is
>
>Charles Repka

To clarify - my thoughts and perhaps it best to provide a bit more
detail. No I never thought to keep them on the SAME disks - clearly
this is not a scenario that is reasonable - rather the thought is
that the assets are far better managed in an IT environment - that
means that the data will be migrated to new disks as the system gets
upgraded over time. I did not get into what good IT practice is -
but of course it includes back ups - storage in multiple locations,
disaster and recovery plans. There is a great deal of information on
the Web if people are interested - and of course this is actually a
profession and taught in colleges and there is an accrediation
process and so forth. I see the data as compressed using LossLESS
compression - perhaps the JPEG-LS algorithm which is an interframe
compression technique designed for excellent compression with high
quality continuous tone images - it appears to be an ISO standard -
it has open source code. Images compressed in this fashion could be
stored in a RAID topology with the ability to regenerate on line
with either disk mirroring or through regeneration if striped - and
of course as mentioned multiple backups in different locations. I
see this as an adjunct to the medialess archive that I have been a
proponent of and which now seems to have some steam behind it as
peer to peer network topology.

Clearly the idea is to make it easier and cheaper to migrate the
information - this is one of the key issues now.

James Lindner