I had the pleasure of a long vacation over Christmas and New Years, during which my family took a ton of digital pictures. About half way through the trip I began to get very nervous that we’d lose the camera, the memory card would become corrupted, or something else bad would happen to the proof of our treasured memories. I brought my laptop with me for the sole purpose of backing up those pictures – which I did.

And as soon as I got home I made sure I copied them to CD and another hard disk. I’m a pretty paranoid guy, so I tend to have 4-5 copies of everything spread across my home network.

So I was particularly sensitized to the idea of losing my backups when I saw an article in ComputerWorld where an undoubtedly smart and well-informed gentlemen by the name of Kurt Gerecke, an IBM storage expert in Germany, told me that I was wasting my time.

Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD,” Gerecke said in an interview this week. “There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more.

Dang, Kurt. I wish you would have told me this before I bought that 100-pack of CD-Rs at Best Buy for $4.99 (after an in-store discount and three mail-in rebates).

Kurt goes on to explain that home-burned CDs aren’t created the same as professionally manufactured CDs.

The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data “shifting” on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam.

Well, at least I keep a few of my backup copies on a hard drive, so I’m ok there, right, Kurt?

Nope.

Hard-drive disks also have their limitations, according to Gerecke. The problem with hard drives, he said, is not so much the disk itself as it is the disk bearing, which has a positioning function similar to a ball bearing. “If the hard drive uses an inexpensive disk bearing, that bearing will wear out faster than a more expensive one,” he said. His recommendation: a hard-drive disk with 7,200 revolutions per minute.

Yeah, I guess that explains why I lose at least one drive a year on my small home network. MTBF of 600K hours? Ha!

So, what’s the answer, Kurt?

To overcome the preservation limitations of burnable CDs, Gerecke suggests using magnetic tapes, which, he claims, can have a life span of 30 to 100 years, depending on their quality. “Even if magnetic tapes are also subject to degradation, they’re still the superior storage media,” he said.

Dude, where have you been?! All the fashionable IT Illuminati are switching to disk backup. At least that’s what my fashionable storage vendor told me. (Oops. I think the company I work for is a storage vendor. Tread carefully, TT.) I could have sworn I’ve seen an article or two saying that tape was dead.

So, there you go. Just when you think you know, apparently you don’t.

Any heavy tape users out there with horror stories? For example, I’ve heard that you have to rewind or retension tapes every year to avoid losing your data. And according to my mortgage company, ABN-AMRO, they apparently fall off trucks and disappear for a few days at a time. But I suppose that’s more of an incompetence issue.

What are some of the other pros and cons of tape? Maybe it’s not quite as dead as I thought it was.

TT

Disclaimer: No actual parrots were harmed in the making of this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 and is filed under General, Advisor - Tom Treadway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.