Washington (dpa) – Most computer users know the importance of backing up data. If you don’t have a separate copy of your files and your hard drive crashes, countless hours of work can be lost in a second.
But once you start backing up data, it’s logical to wonder just how long your backed-up data will last. Will that tape that you’ve carefully stored all of your financial information on disintegrate in two years?
Or how about those floppy disks that contain a snapshot of your life and times five years ago – you don’t want to lose that data. How long will those floppies last?
The durability of removable storage media is actually a hotly debated topic among historians and others interested in preserving today’s data for future generations. But one thing is clear: if you have data that you’d like to preserve for the ages, back it up onto a writeable CD disk. CDs are today’s most durable media.
How long will a CD last? The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the official organization that represents the United States in international standardization efforts, has been working with the U.S. Library of Congress to answer that very question.
No definitive answer regarding the life-expectancy of CDs has been arrived at. But estimates are all over the map – which is one reason why ANSI and other organizations are trying to step in to solve this riddle once and for all.
Some CD-ROM manufacturers have claimed that CDs can last up to 200 years, while others claim the realistic life expectancy is closer to 50 years. Of course, since CD-ROMs disks have not been around even 50 years, most such estimates are based on estimates, given what is known about the materials that CD-ROMs are composed of.
Backup tapes – used by many to store a “safe” copy of data that resides on our relatively fragile hard drives – are inexpensive, but they’re far less durable as well. It’s generally considered that tapes will last about 15 years.
That’s a lot longer than most hard drives will last, however. The average life expectancy of a hard drive is about five years. And don’t even think about backing up to floppy diskettes, if you want your data to be stored permanently.
The average diskette is designed to last only about one year.
Remember, though, that technological obsolescence is far more likely to pose a threat to your data than media deterioration. In other words, will the CD-ROM format even exist 75 or 100 years from today?
Just imagine storing one of today’s CD-ROM discs and attempting to use it 100 years from now. Where in the world would you have to go to find a CD-ROM drive? A museum?
To put this in perspective, only 15 years ago, the 5-1/4 inch floppy drive was just about the only form of removable storage available on PCs. Now, they are practically extinct. If you have lots of files stored on the old 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, and you’ve tried to use them in a new computer, you know the problem all too well.
And how about the application that created the data? That’s another consideration if you’re thinking of storing files for a long time. You could store a copy of the application along with the data, but then you have to take into consideration that all applications run on an operating system, which in turn runs on specific hardware.
Will you have access to the operating system or the hardware 100 years from now?
The bottom line is that if you want to store files for many years, your best bet would be to stick with file formats that are close to universal – such as plain ASCII text – and planning on migrating your data to the latest storage formats as the years go by.
