Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format

Re:Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format by hga on Monday March 10, 2014 @11:12AM (#7373348)

The nice thing about external USB drives is that you can position them some distance from your computer. Back before I switched to LTO tape, mine were taped down in a low/no traffic area. But, yes, they're fragile, almost certainly the most fragile backup media you can use, and my first set didn't survive this http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/, at least not without reporting so many errors I gave up on them.

And you're of course right about the cloud, especially in the US; I've got rock solid AT&T ADSL, but it's very A(symmetric) and has a 150 GiB monthly cap, so only my very most important stuff gets saved to rsync.net, which e.g. saved my email from the tornado.

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Re:Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format by dragontamer on Monday March 10, 2014 @01:52PM (#7374498)

Hard Disks are not an archival format. In addition to the standard data retention issues... arms can rust and get stuck. There are simply more moving parts to a mechanical hard drive than either optical storage or tape storage.

Archival hard drives exist of course, but are at a cost disadvantage compared to tapes or optical media.

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