Re: Home made backup system

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

Thanks for the reply and the useful explanations (and the expression of 
limitation of your personal knowledge).  I will add one question / comment 
down below:

On Thursday, December 26, 2019 10:23:54 AM Greg Wooledge wrote:
> For most people, it comes down to "when you can't write to the device
> any more, you throw it away and get another".

I guess that is the rub, and a question, I'll want to throw it away when I 
can't read from it anymore.  (But only if I somehow either copy all the still 
good stuff off it, or have another copy that is still readable.)

(I once read a thread about long term archival storage where they suggested a 
scheme (I think it might have been CDs at the time), like every year making 
one (or more) additional copies of the CD (and, probably, but I really don't 
remember details), starting with more than one copy (CD) of the data to be 
archived.  (IIRC, the objective was trying to maintain the data intact for 100 
years or something like that.)

I wonder if failures typically start with a failure to write or a failure to 
read?  I suspect it depends on a lot of factors, e.g., like age of the writing 
-- I mean, under the wrong (for someone looking for long term back up / 
archival storage), something might be written successfully, but 20 years later 
might not be readable.

Of course, I am unlikely to need my backups for more than a few months, so 
most of the above is probably moot. ;-)