Archive w/o power for years

[pairustwo]

I want to tuck about 100G worth of photos, music, and documents away in a safe deposit box. I'll be out of the country for a couple of years, without a house, and so on.

I thought that a hard disk drive would be the simplest and cheapest option.

I have heard recently that unless a HDD is spun up every couple of years that it may or is likely to freeze up. Does anyone feel that this is the case or is it complete nonsense?

 

[Arcanedeath]

The bearings in the HDD my seize or dry out if you let it sit for to long w/out spining it up, its not a good long term storage method, your best bet is archival quality DVD/CD media for that length of time and back it up more than once. 2 years is prob. the longest I'd risk leaving a HDD and sill expecting it to work, I'd also suggest you back it up to 2 and not just one incase one of your copies fails or is corupted.

Edit: I have a 40 gig Maxtor (one of the very first fluid bearing ide drives) based on a quantam design that still works and sat for 2.5 years at one point (it was used for about 6 months then put on a shelf in a warehouse) that still had usable data, but its really a crapshoot when you let something sit that long.

 

[Blain]

IF the photos and other documents are valuable to you, go with a 1, 2, 3 punch...
* WD or Seagate HD
* Verbatim MediDisc
* Verbatim UltraLife Gold

 

[oog]

upload it to an online service that does backups

 

[pairustwo]

Originally posted by: oog
upload it to an online service that does backups

I guess I could look into this but pushing 100G upstream is not going to go over well with my isp.

Plus I can't imagine how long that would take. Any tips on the online backup procedure?

pairustwo

 

[RebateMonger]

No matter what backup media you choose, I always recommend having two different copies. Hard drives, tapes, DVD, CD, etc. can all fail. I definitely wouldn't trust single copies of CDs or DVDs. An online service presumably should be making safe backups, so it might be an exception to the "two copies" rule.