On Wednesday 06 December 2023 at 12:44:44, Didier Kryn wrote:

> I believe the most reliable long term archive is a spinning disk you put
> on a shelf and you read very rarely.

I'm assuming you mean not spinning at the time, in which case I think two
disks are essential, with regular (eg: annual) checks that they do actually
spin when you want them to.

I've certainly had example of disks in machines which I've then stopped using,
and maybe 3 years later decided to archive the contents of the drives, only to
find that they won't even start.

> Of course, on very long term, you must also take care that the filesystem and
> the image encodings are still supported.

Anyone who's worked with mag tapes, punched cards, paper tape, 8" floppies,
CP/M, Pr1mOS, etc is already familiar with that problem :)


Antony.

--
1960s: Let's build a network which can withstand a nuclear war!
1970s: Hm, that looks good, we'll run it on TCP/IPv4.
1980s: Nice, how about letting everyone join?
1990s: Hey, you can make money out of this!
2000s: Oh, you can lose it, too.
2010s: Alright, let's just plug absolutely everything into it.
2020s: Meh, my lightswitch is now connected to my lamp via China.

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