Best long-term storage device?

A

Ashton

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Nov 13, 2004
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I have several older PCs; ones that will not run Vista and for which the drivers will soon vanish.

What is the best way to store data for long-term? As little as two of these systems are used it wouldnt suprise me if 5-10 years from now I still have them and may need to reformat and reinstall everything...

On a more preactical note, I'd also like to know this for storing tax records, since IRS can audit you for like 20 years....
 
Buy a large external drive and back up everything. These older PC's do have USB ports, right?
 
everything has its weakness, cds/dvd dont seem to like some kinds of direct light, tape media is sensitive the magnetism, hard drives vibrations/bumps/drops magnetism as well

for archiving for business purposes here, i pull the hard drive when someones leaves, archive the drive, after making an image of the drive to my archive raid 5 server(which goes onto nightly tape backups), and another onto DVD...if they all fail when it comes time to get at that data is just wasn't meant to be :), the pulled drives and dvd/tapes are in separate locations within the building in fireproof safes, the problem is alot of tape/dvd media melt inside fire proof safes just from the heat so nothing is certain.
 
How much data are we talking? If it's just drivers and tax records, I'd be surprised if it's much more than 100 MB, in which case you're probably best off going with a brute force method - get a bunch of cheap storage and replicate it. If one method fails, you'll have a few others. Burn a bunch of DVDs, keep them in different places, do the same with some USB flash drives, and a couple of the cheapest external drives you can find. Put your data on all of these, and distribute amongst family members and friends for safe keeping.

Of course, if the amount of storage required is higher than you're letting on, that approach may get prohibitively expensive, in which case I'd scale it back to a couple hard drives from different manufacturers. But keep the off-site backups for sure.
 
I would go with multiple media. So depending on how much data you actually have to store, I suggest DVDs, a tape backup in a metal enclosure, and maybe even a harddrive in a metal enclosure.

Oh, and AFAIK the IRS can only audit individuals up to 7 years.
 
You have a super old system now and expect to use it for 10 more years?! Either this is a super expensive legacy system or there are some lazy admins around :D
 
what about using gmail to email them to yourself.... then archive and star them and theoretically they will be there forever....

add that to a DVD, HDD soltuion and you have off site and multiple medium on site storage..

I use mozy home which i got a coupon for it was like $40 a year for unlimited backup
 
[LYL]Homer;1034368492 said:
Online cloud backup - Dropbox, Mozy, etc.
Click to expand...

Good point, overlooked that. I'd definitely be encrypting any tax or financial information before doing that however.
 
I'd go with a bunch of hard drives. Copy your data to ~3 drives and keep them in different physical locations.
 
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