They all deteriorate There is no media that does not deteriorate over time.
For many years, the gold standard for long term data retention was optical disk (not CD or DVD, but a special format/media called Magneto-Optical - there were/are also other formats).
Optical Disks fell out of favor in the last 5-10 years - mostly due to their lack of storage capacity (a max of around 9GB per disk) and high cost. Even with some more recent improvements in technology, the capacity of these disks is not anywhere near what spinning media can hold. (ie: 1TB per disk).
MO disks are good for up to about 100 years. Of course, that's assuming that you can find a drive that can READ them 100 years from now!!!
Tape (LTO, DLT, etc) is typically good for 40-50 years.
CD & DVD's are typically rated around 25 years (it varies a little based on dyes used, etc). Most people don't realize that regular "printed" CDs are stamped in aluminum (or similar substrate) while writable disks contain dyes instead of aluminum.
Flash drives are not considered a long-term retention media.
The current state-of-the-art technology for data retention is something like the HP RISS (
http://h18006.www1.hp.com...ts/storageworks/riss/) or the EMC Celerra (
http://www.emc.com/produc...mily.htm). Note there are other manufacturers.
These are spinning-disk systems that are designed to be relatively low-cost (ie: they use SATA drives rather than SCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS drives) and are intended to used differently - as the data gets older (and with it the storage system) we expect our customers to migrate their data to a NEW storage system. This should occur every 5-10 years or so.
The idea is that since storage technology is changing too rapidly, one needs to keep the data on something that can be easily read - think about what I said above about getting something that can actually read the disks. If your technology is within 2-3 generations of current, you should be able to move the data. Any more than that and all bets are off.
I can't tell you mow many 5.25" floppy disks, 9-track tapes, zip disks, QIC tapes, etc that I have thrown out because I can't read them anymore. Next are my 1.44MB floppies, CD-ROMs, and Parallel ATA drives. ;^)
If you want to have something for personal use (such as storing your digital photos), I would suggest something really cheap - like a USB hard drive (160GB, 500GB). Use 2 of them to be sure that one would be readable in 5 years, and make 2 copies of everything.
Then, just like with the fancy new systems, copy it to whatever is current every 5 years - so you'll never throw it out because you can't read it.
There is no media that does not deteriorate over time.
For many years, the gold standard for long term data retention was optical disk (not CD or DVD, but a special format/media called Magneto-Optical - there were/are also other formats).
Optical Disks fell out of favor in the last 5-10 years - mostly due to their lack of storage capacity (a max of around 9GB per disk) and high cost. Even with some more recent improvements in technology, the capacity of these disks is not anywhere near what spinning media can hold. (ie: 1TB per disk).
MO disks are good for up to about 100 years. Of course, that's assuming that you can find a drive that can READ them 100 years from now!!!
Tape (LTO, DLT, etc) is typically good for 40-50 years.
CD & DVD's are typically rated around 25 years (it varies a little based on dyes used, etc). Most people don't realize that regular "printed" CDs are stamped in aluminum (or similar substrate) while writable disks contain dyes instead of aluminum.
Flash drives are not considered a long-term retention media.
The current state-of-the-art technology for data retention is something like the HP RISS (
http://h18006.www1.hp.com...ts/storageworks/riss/) or the EMC Celerra (
http://www.emc.com/produc...mily.htm). Note there are other manufacturers.
These are spinning-disk systems that are designed to be relatively low-cost (ie: they use SATA drives rather than SCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS drives) and are intended to used differently - as the data gets older (and with it the storage system) we expect our customers to migrate their data to a NEW storage system. This should occur every 5-10 years or so.
The idea is that since storage technology is changing too rapidly, one needs to keep the data on something that can be easily read - think about what I said above about getting something that can actually read the disks. If your technology is within 2-3 generations of current, you should be able to move the data. Any more than that and all bets are off.
I can't tell you mow many 5.25" floppy disks, 9-track tapes, zip disks, QIC tapes, etc that I have thrown out because I can't read them anymore. Next are my 1.44MB floppies, CD-ROMs, and Parallel ATA drives. ;^)
If you want to have something for personal use (such as storing your digital photos), I would suggest something really cheap - like a USB hard drive (160GB, 500GB). Use 2 of them to be sure that one would be readable in 5 years, and make 2 copies of everything.
Then, just like with the fancy new systems, copy it to whatever is current every 5 years - so you'll never throw it out because you can't read it.