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Bentley Home PC Support - Articles - Your data is gone: Part 2

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Your data is gone: Part 2

Perpetual storage isn't a thing. Even hard drives which aren't used eventually deteriorate, something the music industry has been discovering recently. During the 00's record companies started transferring old recordings from tape to hard drives as the tapes were deteriorating. However recently about 20% of the hard drives which were stored were found to have failed, despite having been left unused and unplugged. Circuitry and capacitors age. Which leaves us with the dilemma of how to store data so that it doesn't disappear, and the only solution at the present point in time appears to be redundancy.

Redundancy is backing stuff up to at least one other place, so that if one storage device dies, you can restore from the other one. At this point in time cloud storage starts to look pretty good, mainly because the online systems already have multiple levels of redundancy built into them ie. you're not relying on a single hard drive somewhere out there in the world, you're relying on many. Cloud storage costs more and is reliant on (largely foreign) companies which could potentially disappear at any point. But realistically if you pick one of the larger companies (google, microsoft, amazon or apple) the chances of them going under is much lower, and you can always change providers if you need to.

However it is nice to have something a bit more private and local to store upon, without having to get involved with online accounts, passwords and the potential for your information to be stolen as part of a data breach. You can create multiple redundant backups yourself if you're diligent, by backing up to several external devices, on either a weekly or monthly basis, and unplugging them from your computer afterwards to prevent data loss via electrical spikes, viruses and theft.

This still doesn't solve the issue of how to store stuff permanently though. Recently there's been some developments in the field of long-term storage: a company called Cerabyte has developed low-cost, resilient glass-platter storage which could last up to 5000 years, though it'll be a while before it's commercialised, and that's if the company manages to stay profitable. Other organisations are attempting similar things. That's good news, as hard drives, DVDs and CDroms are environmentally damaging, due to their short lifespan.

Despite being horribly easy to scratch and ruin, I still have CDroms from the 90's that're working, and (albeit fewer) DVDroms from the 00's which also work. But good luck storing your data on a paltry 640MB or 4.7GB storage device nowadays. No, if you want data security, right now you're left with cloud storage, or local backups to 1 or more external hard drives, replacing them when they fail. Nothing lasts forever.

- Matt Bentley, computer expert at Bentley Home PC Support.
Email info@homepcsupport.co.nz or phone 0211348576.

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