Comment by beauHD
3 years ago
> data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years in order to ensure it’s safe and easily accessible
This is what I do. I hate doing it, but it's for posterity's sake. I'd be lost without certain data. I have old virtual machine disk images that I've been using for years, ISOs of obscure software, and other rarities. Every 4 years I buy a new 4TB HDD and copy over files to a freshly bought disk.
> data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years in order to ensure it’s safe and easily accessible
I used to do that but found it to be a gamble. I have files back to the 80s, so I rotated them from 5.25" floppies to 3.5" floppies to zip drives to CD-R and the DVD-R. But it's a fragile system, files can get corrupted somewhere along the line and if I didn't migrate in time it can be hard to go back. For instance I lost a handful of files during the iomega zip drive phase when the drive died and I had no way to recover (and the files weren't that important to try to source a new iomega drive).
Now I simply keep everything online in a big zfs mirror pool.
Hang on, that sounds like you're copying critical data to a single disk?
That's not actually the case is it?!?!?!
It makes sense if you keep the old disks around until they kick it. You can always have 3-5 copies around in a decently readable state
If you're not periodically checking the data for corruption, and only moving from a single drive to a replacement single drive, eventually you'll have some corrupted data which gets copied from drive to drive without you noticing.
4 TB drives are dirt cheap. If someone would really be "lost" without this data, having some redundancy would be inexpensive and easy.
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You'd at least need to check checksums of all of them post-copy and preferably store it in error-resistant (RAID5/6 or other error correction) way. Else you might just be copying the errors that sneak in. It might not even be the source hard drive producing it just transient bit flip in RAM