Long-term storage and backup of digital music files

Expected lifespan of an always-up-and-spining drive is about three years.

No, this "ten year" thing DEFINITELY applies to drives not used for a very long time simply not spinning up. "stiction" is a generic concept which some apply to hard drives, but many of the culprits of "stiction" in hard drives as we used to know it (not parking the read/write heads, for example) are practices no longer in use. Unfortunately, higher operating temperatures remain a problem. So any problem that that heat might cause (lubricant breakdown, electronics failure) are in play.

It's not like I've had oodles of failures, but I would not put a hard drive on a shelf for 10 years and assume it'll mechanically spin up and hand over its data in 2027.

 

CD-R and DVD-R have had a (no pun intended) considerable shelf life as a data medium, and as changes in system speeds have improved, so has the retrieval time (to a point, but a good point.)

I remember life before IDE/ATA hard drives, and that's effectively been dead for years. Changes in tape technology feel like they're happening on a monthly basis.

Yes, I have suffered the occasional CD-R/DVD-R failure, but OTOH, if they have not failed, there's so many options for me to get the data back. I have many many many that are more than a dozen years old and have still yielded their secrets to me. (Now, about that music library I thought was good for life on $40 Travan-3 cartridges....or IOMEGA ZIP and JAZ drives... or on CD-R.... in proprietary Seagate and HP Backup software formats? Oy.)

 

I utilize Milleniata M-discs. I have no idea if they'll last the claimed 1000 yrs, and I doubt very much I'll be around to check. That said, if I can retrieve data from them 10+ yrs from now, I'll be happy.

 

From the admittedly little that I know of the mDiscs, It might be that the DVD are a good bet. But, I read a very disparaging review of the mDisc BluRay which suggests mDiscBluRay may be no longer lasting than ordinary BluRay.
Maybe the review was biased.

 

Have a link to the Blu-Ray review by chance? Some of that unreliability of the Blu-Ray M-Disc has been linked to issues with very early M-Disc drives.

 

Back up your music collections on 10 1/2 inch reels at 7 1/2 ips. You'll have them forever.

 

Review, Tested: Verbatim Lifetime Archival (Millenniata/M-Disc) 4x BD-R 25Gb

I am not sure if the take away from the link

• is that Millenial BluRay discs are no better than ordinary BluRay disc
• Is that BluRay discs in general are just as good as mDisc DVD

 

I am considering buying three copies of every Cd so that I have redundant copies of my entire collection. I will place each collection on a different continent, where at each location, there will be three CDP's.
Used CD's are cheap these days, you know?

 

Multiple drives, on and off site. I keep separate folders of everything in FLAC and ALAC.

Interestingly, every now and then I will encounter a file that has become corrupted and then have to go back and either convert it from the other lossless format or dig out the original CD and re rip it. Had to do that today with one track. If you want to scare yourself, run a test conversion of all of your lossless files using dBPoweramp Batch Converter, which will identify corrupted files. Last time I did this maybe 5 out of 1000+ albums had tracks that had become corrupted, despite my being pretty fastidious about using AccurateRip / secure ripping. I would suggest that if you just backup without occasionally actively verifying the integrity of your files that you risk backing up accumulated gremlins. I have no idea why this sort of thing happens, as I run a Mac, a PC and keep backups on a NAS and multiple drives, but that is what I have experienced.

 

Result: You will have a ton of Cds that wont play 20 years from now.

Analog tape has proven stable for 70 years, you know?

 

B-b-but I will have have three different flavor of CD players at each location.
These would all be Silver Cd's, not CDR.
What are the odds my imaginary plan will fail?

 

Its the Cds themselves that I do not trust remain in stable condition say 20 years from now. Call me crazy.

 

Commercial CD manufactured prior to 1998 are now suspect? Hmm.

 

That sounds like data degradation or "data rot" due to the magnetic fields losing polarity. It is a good idea to rewrite your data once a year.
Cheers

 

I have two versions of my digital library. I listen to one in my home office, and one in my main system. I have reopened portable drives with friends. Everything may not be up to the minute current, but it seems permanent enough.

 

I have everything on an external drive (where players access it), a copy on an internal drive, and the external copy is backed up along with everything else I want to preserve to a different external drive and to a cloud backup provider halfway across country.

I think I'm covered!

This, this, a thousand times this.

RAID is a high-availability solution. It is ***NOT*** a backup solution.

 

I started buying CDs in 1986. (That's now 30 years ago!!)

First three titles were "Parade", "Unforgettable Fire", and the Stones' "Rewind". All still play.

 

SyncToy works good for me, no errors here. You just have to map the folders and off you go. What kind of erros did you get?

 

Also started buying in '86. Parade was also among the first batch of CD's purchased.

 

If Cds were a legitimate backup solution, corporations would be using them ( or any kind of spinning disk, for that matter) and not hi cap LTO tapes for network archiving, because shiny disks are far, far cheaper....like 90% cheaper. They dont. That should tell you something.

 

None of the spinning optical discs come close to having the capacity of LTO tapes or the transmission speeds, so enterprises don't use them for offline backup because they don't have the warehouse space to store all of the discs, the time to wait to read or write data to them, or the staff to shuffle them around to conduct any backups or restores. An LTO Ultrium tape holds 6TB and transmits 300MB/s. The most advanced Blu-ray holds 128GB and transmits data at a top speed of 72MB/s.

In my experience, quality writeable optical discs are at least as reliable as tape storage - at least, per unit - but due to the reduced capacity and transmission speeds simply aren't practical for enterprise backup.

 

So what about SSD for backup strictly looking at reliability? Pricing for necessary sizes will eventually equate to those HDD.

 

>>>>>>Your post is actually not true, it omits several very important points and compares apples to oranges:

First of all, CDs came out WAY before LTO tapes were available. 8 mm Cartridge tapes, (like those used in camcorders) which had much less storage space, were what companies used for data storage in the first phase of the Cd era. Then came DLT carts, then SDLT carts, then LTO. The data storage needs of most companies in the 1980s , (before Enron, Worldcom and other calamities in the absence of todays federal, state, and document retention laws, were like 70% less then today. Companies didnt shun Cds because of the storage size, they were not considered reliable enough, or tough enough for long term archiving storage. Data managers were afraid of CDs getting scratched or even melting in a high heat environment. Go back and read the IT manager publications of the time.