If you’re like me, you’ve got boxes and drawers filled with video tape, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, and even audio cassette tapes. Some of that stuff might seem indestructible, but it isn’t. Physical media deteriorate over time, and Tech and Life recently highlighted a couple of articles from PCMech that detail just how long you can expect your physical media to last, and what you can do to preserve your files.
Photo by Joelk75.
PCMech covered three types of physical media, and how long you can expect them to last before “bit rot” sets in:
Optical Media = 2-3 years
Storage Only Hard Drive = 5+ years
Flash Storage = indefinite
I’m not sure where these numbers come from (I haven’t had the best of luck with USB thumb drives, for example), but if they are accurate, then the answer to preventing bit rot is to get your data onto flash media. PCMech also offers some other tips for preserving your media, such as putting your data into file archives (like zip or RAR files), as a damaged archive file can sometimes be recovered.
I’d add one tip to this overview: redundancy. Don’t rely on just one type of physical media for your precious files. Make sure you have at least two, if not three, copies of your important files, and make sure that those copies are on at least two types of media. So, for example, if you have your photos on a hard drive, copy them onto a second hard drive, and also copy them to a flash drive.
How do you protect your precious memories from destruction?
How long will your data and photos last on backup media? [Tech and Life]
How Long Will That Media Last? [PCMech]
How To Avoid Bit Rot [ PCMech]
Maria Pavel says:
Hi Evan,
I am a memory-lover too, I have too boxes and drawers filled with video tapes, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, and even audio cassette tapes like you said. I also have my hard-disk almost full with pictures and videos… memories. The memories are priceless, it’s very important to capture important events that are part of your life and take photos from time to time, they sure are very precious and loved memories, things to bring us back the past while looking at them, it’s really nice. Thanks a lot for sharing this great article and those excellent links to different tips.
Best regards,
Maria
January 30, 2011 — 10:13 pm
Evan Kline says:
Glad we could help, Maria. It sounds like you might have even more stuff to preserve than I do!
January 31, 2011 — 6:54 pm
Martin says:
And don’t forget to store one of your copies in a different building. If your house burns down then everything gets trashed. I do make DVD back-ups of my photos once a year (They are backed up to a hard drive more often!) and then give the discs to my Mum.
And also online back-up is another option to make sure you don’t lose anything.
My next project is to get the hundreds of normal photographs scanned in so I can access them on my computer. Perversely, I’ll probably make them into a photo book afterwards!
February 1, 2011 — 9:28 am
Evan Kline says:
Good point, Martin. That’s perhaps the most important step in the 3-2-1 backup plan that I hear some tech gurus talk about. I use Carbonite and Dropbox to get my important info out into the cloud.
Sounds like you’ve got a huge project at hand. It will be well worth it, though.
February 1, 2011 — 11:41 am
George@Leaf blower says:
Great article, Evan,
One question though: Are these numbers for drives that are only for pure storage? If I am accessing files on a daily basis on a traditional HD, how can long can I expect it to retain the data?
George
April 9, 2011 — 5:37 pm
Evan Kline says:
I think it is a bit of a mix. If you look at the one article, it talks about 3-5 being normal for a HDD, with that increasing to 5+ for a storage only drive. The PC Mech article isn’t well-sourced, though, as mentioned, so I’m not sure where the data comes from.
April 10, 2011 — 9:32 am
Joshua says:
Everyone wants to preserve his collection of media containing data that might have been collected over a long span of time containing immensely valuable pictures. One way that I see of doing this can be periodic shift of data from old media to new ones.
May 20, 2011 — 5:06 am