I am fortunate to have overheard and then was permitted to join a conversation between a couple of Data storage specialists back in the late 90s. From them I learned that DVDs, CDs, Hard Drives and the like have a life span of around 20 years. Yes, the plastic and the metal embedded within this may last forever, the magnetic field holding to zeros and ones in their proper places degrades rapidly. If those in the directory go, then all the rest is inaccessible. Otherwise, it is just the individual files which have decayed that won’t be, but eventually, the directory will also decay rendering all that was still viable inaccessible. So I resave and reburn my data to DVDs from time to time. Have so much now that I is getting hard to do so.
Digital storage was promoted to be forever.
Sadly not true.
Converted family history is now on 'fatal error' disks now unreadable.
*Sigh*
I am fortunate to have overheard and then was permitted to join a conversation between a couple of Data storage specialists back in the late 90s. From them I learned that DVDs, CDs, Hard Drives and the like have a life span of around 20 years. Yes, the plastic and the metal embedded within this may last forever, the magnetic field holding to zeros and ones in their proper places degrades rapidly. If those in the directory go, then all the rest is inaccessible. Otherwise, it is just the individual files which have decayed that won’t be, but eventually, the directory will also decay rendering all that was still viable inaccessible. So I resave and reburn my data to DVDs from time to time. Have so much now that I is getting hard to do so.
Love the daguerreotypes.