Hmm... Iirc SSDs need to be powered up regularly. So storing them for years time might work, but also given the rise of qlc SSDs I wouldn't trust them for longer-term offline storage.
The only effective way to preserve is to transcribe.
Think of it - how many ancient texts survived because we found papyrus in a jar in some cave? The Ancient Greek works and other things were mostly preserved by monks and others making copies over time.
I consulted with an archive a few years ago. They had acquired from records to be preserved from another entity - delivered on circa 1997 DAT tapes. That was challenging to recover circa 2017, in 2030 it will be very difficult and expensive. Ditto for MDisc.
As the saying goes, the information wasn't lost when the Library of Alexandria burned down; it was lost because no one had bothered to make a copy before the fire.
Can confirm. SSD are volatile storage. It's pretty much the worst option for long term backups.
I believe the spec only demands persistence if they're powered on at least once every 90 days, the same applies to USB sticks btw.
The data isn't lost after 90days, but bit rot occurs at a highly accelerated frequency. So you might not notice or care if there is a gray pixel in your image you've stored on your USB stick, but that's what it means to use volatile storage.
Basically all digital storage mediums suffer from mid- to long-term longevity issues:
* Magnetic media such as HDD and tape will eventually lose magnetization.
* Ink-based optical media such as CD-R and DVD-R will eventually suffer chemical degradation.
* NAND media such as SSD and flash will eventually lose electrical charge.
* All digital data and media will eventually lose methods of access.
The only way to guarantee digital data long-term is to re-archive on a consistent and frequent basis so that the passage of time doesn't render the data inaccessible or illegible.
Digital data simply isn't durable unlike analog data.
I agree with everything you said up to the last sentence.
> Digital data simply isn't durable unlike analog data.
What I would say is, the most popular digital storage hardware like HDD/SSD are significantly less durable than historically proven analog media like paper and stone.
From a theoretic point of view, digital data is vastly more durable than analog data. Think of what the word means - digital means digits, from a finite alphabet, stringed in a sequence; analog means continuous values on a continuous medium. Written language is digital. Transcriptions of ancient texts survive to the current day and can be copied and recopied indefinitely into the future. Black-and-white barcodes created today can be copied losslessly as many times as we want.
One of the problems with digital data is that there's too much of it. If a photo is 1 MB, can we realistically print ~8 million black/white dots arranged in a grid on a piece of paper that we can quickly and reliably read back? It's hard. That's why analog solutions are so appealing, because viewing an analog photograph doesn't require special technology, and the loss of thousands of dots is completely inconsequential.
Analog media can indeed be very volatile. Look at photos stored on film - will the chemicals degrade? Will the colors change? Will the film get scratched and dusty? And unlike digital, you cannot make a perfect copy of film. You can't duplicate every atom and position them exactly. This goes for all other analog media as well. You cannot duplicate the atoms of ink and paper. You cannot duplicate a magnetic tape. You cannot duplicate a marble sculpture.
> Can confirm. SSD are volatile storage. It's pretty much the worst option for long term backups.
you're making a fair point that should be noted, but you're ignoring what I said which I also think is a fair point that should be noted.
I did not say SSDs are good long term backups. I said (you should read the original but to reduce it) SSDs are reliable in the short term and unbelievably convenient and serially using them in the short term let's you use them for as long as you wish in the long term.
I didn't mention it but it's a good practice to test backups to make sure that they are still backups. Choose the time interval you are comfortable with and visit your offsite backups, make sure they match your current storage.
I do not recommend "longer term", I suggested swapping your old drive for a new one every two years, that's the length of the term. I do every year, because that's how often I buy stuff, but I didn't want others to say "too expensive"
