• Helix
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    3 years ago

    I’ve read that data rot can start to occur in as little as 1year if the data hasn’t been “refreshed” by powering the hard drive on and re-writing all the data.

    Exactly, and with SSDs that can happen after a few weeks (!) of not turning the thing on. The only really reliable way is probably compressing and encoding it into literal granite.

    LTO tapes certified for 30+ years of cold storage

    Yeah, We had one of those we couldn’t read because some dumdum stored it sideways. The bits literally fall down, so you have to store LTO drives like this: | and not like this: _ ;)

    Cold storage is a science in and of itself, there’s college courses for archivists about storage formats. tl;da: use several media and copy it around with checksums every few years. Keep the data luke-warm, not ice-cold.