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Thanks for that Carl, but I would worry about the reliabilty data because I suspect it is based on the HDD being used more or less continuously. I would anticipate that my HDD would be used infrequently, say once every 10 years. Mechanical devices "like" to be kept moving in my experience and also HDDs would need the associated technology to enable them to be read.
What about SD cards, no moving parts, but would they retain the data over the years, maybe associated technology is simpler? and therefore more likely to survive. (I lost an SD card once and found it several months later in the mud, it still worked perfectly)
Surely this must be becoming an important subject with everyone having digital photos etc. I see you can buy "archive" quality DVD's with extra protective layers, but I just have so little confidence in DVDs generally.
PS when researching this on the Internet I saw a humerous comment " the world is divided into two sets of people, those who have had a HDD failure and those who are about to have one".
Well I am in the first set, I have had hard drive failure. More than one. In both cases they were Seagate drives One was a 15 GB and one was a 20 GB. Those capacities is not made any more.
I really do not know how reliable SD cards are over the long term. I have had too many of them fail in normal use.
One thing about SD cards they are pretty much water proof. They are solid state devices and like any transistor, they are easy to burn up if the voltage applied is wrong.
I think the hard drive is an exception to Mechanical devices "like" to be kept moving. The construction of a hard drive does not require oil. the bearings are permanently lubricated, The platter is directly on the motor shaft. What Hard drives do not survive is high gravity. Do not drop one from 10 feet or so. Or Water. They would not survive a flood.
The big problem I see with optical media is the ability to read them years later.
Technology on Optical media changes so much.
Optical disks are not very reliable for long term data retention.
Currently the External Hard Drive connected by USB is the most reliable media now. As I said before, any backup media you choose now will need to be updated and the data refreshed every few years.
I know for a fact that the Floppy Disk was not a good Media for long term data storage. I have some 5.25 inch floppies that are hard to read. I also have some 3.5 1.44MB floppies that are hard to read. These disks were written about 1998-99, some of them are not readable at all.
Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.