you know I think we've all been a little spoiled by digital data storage if you
put something on your hard drive SSD or a rable CD if that's still your thing
for whatever reason you can expect to be able to pull it up again whenever you
want with every bit exactly where it's supposed to be but despite the relative
reliability of digital data storage compared to the days when we consumed
everything on cassette tapes and VHS data stored on Modern media can still
Decay degrade and disappear over time so
alliteration aside how does this happen and what can you do to prevent it let's
start by a look at mechanical hard drives which although more economical
than solid state drives can fail due to the moving Parts on the inside wearing
out or through damage to the platters if
something like a head crash happens but suppose you've got a Dependable hard
drive that you take good care of by not subjecting it to shock moisture or your
pet fret how could data on the drive Decay without any kind of physical
damage or mishap you see hard drives store data as clusters of magnetic bits
that are pointed in a certain direction that have the potential to flip to the
opposite direction Over time however since modern hard drives have built in
features to periodically refresh those bits of data and they also have
error-checking algorithms that can often detect and fix flipped bits this kind of
data rot is mostly a problem for drives that have been sitting around unplugged
for 5 or 10 years at a time so the
average user probably won't have to worry about this all that much but it
can matter if you're using hard drives for very long-term archival style
storage ssds on the other hand can be quite a bit more fickle with retaining
data for long periods of time although ssds are often regarded as more durable
than hard drives due their lack of moving Parts they don't hold data as
well because they rely on trapping an electrical charge inside of a small
transistor these charges can weaken over time and while making transistors
smaller and smaller have increased SSD
capacities it has also decreased data
longevity although you can fight this off by making sure to not leave your SSD
unplugged for long periods of time and just powering it on regularly they do
tend to not last as long as hard drives went unplugged if you live in a warmer
climate your SSD might not even hold data for more than like a year if you
aren't using it as heat can accelerate data decay in those transistors so make
sure you're not doing stuff like leaving a laptop with an SSD in the back of a
hot car for long periods of time like you go on a trip or something but Luke
what if I just store all of my super important stuff on optical discs you
don't exactly have to turn on a CD so
isn't that a better idea well yes and no
Optical discs unfortunately are also susceptible to degradation in a number
of ways just different ways such as oxidization of the metallic layer that
actually holds the data when air seeps in through imperfections in the outer
plastic layer of the disc adhesives that hold the different layers of a disc
together can break down over time as well even making it possible to
physically pull apart the disc like some kind of weird sandwich however you can
get archival quality discs engineered with more durable materials that can
reliably store data for between 20 and
100 years depending on how exactly they're manufactured and there's even a
relatively new type of optical disc called the M dis that claims it can
store data for a thousand years whoa but
since no long-term storage solution is perfect the best way to make sure your
important stuff lasts as long as you want it to is make sure that you have
independent redundant backups whether that's your home or with a cloud-based
archival service and remembering things like not to leave your dri sitting
around or using them as paper weights if something's really that important I hear
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