What do you gents think is the better way to store movies for 20+ years?
When I say DVD I mean the better quality ones.
When I say DVD I mean the better quality ones.
I would say it depends on how much you are going to use the media over the next 20 years. If it'll go in a closet and be forgotten for 2 decades then go with DVDs. They will certainly be obsolete by then but you should still be able to find a player. And the discs themselves, as long as they are stored properly, will work perfectly fine. But if this is a movie collection you are going to watch fairly regularly then go for an HDD system with redundant backups. As technology advances you will be able to update the storage. So today they may go on 1-3 terrabyte HDDs in a RAID setup. In a few years you can move it to SSDs as they take over, then eventually you'll be able to move to whatever is the next big thing (cloud?). The key with hard drives is to have a redundant backups so no single disc failure will wipe out your data.
The other advantage of HDDs is physical space. In a space the size of a dozen or so DVD cases you could have a drive setup holding hundreds or even thousands of movies. And because of Moore's law that disparity will only increase as time goes on. So eventually an entire closet full of DVDs will fit on something equivalent to a thumb drive.
But if you don't update the storage you may well find yourself in a situation where you try to boot up an HDD years down the line and find that the disc has failed, the data has been corrupted, computers of that time can no longer read it, or some combination.
I would think that the whole point of storing something is that you don't have to constantly spend the $$$ to move the stuff from one storage medium to another. Besides, when you store movies on a HD, aren't you storing it in a specific computer-based media format that requires a compatible computer software player? What happens in five years when the media format you've stored all these files in becomes obsolete? At least with a DVD you can be pretty sure it will play on just about any DVD player that is compatible with your region.
so you're saying that in 10 years time my current external hard drive will be useless?...
Do hard drives really fail, in 10years i havent had one fail.
Oh my, you don't want to know. You have been very lucky though.
I never trust them. The hard drive in my first new pc in 1994 failed in 3 weeks. I've had a couple fail since in addition to others become corrupted making the data unreadable. I always backup data files on several drives, usually a second internal and one or two external. However, all my movies are stored on DVD's. I view DVD's as the safest storage right now. I don't worry about technology 20 years out.Do hard drives really fail, in 10years i havent had one fail.
When I worked in a datacentre with thousands of servers, we had to replace one or two hard drives a day on average. And that was high-end ultra-reliable SCSI drives. Nearly all predictive failures rather than actual dying, but failing is failing. Out they went.Do hard drives really fail, in 10years i havent had one fail.
another question i have is if you don't use the hard drive in like say 5 years does that do it harm?
What do you gents think is the better way to store movies for 20+ years?
When I say DVD I mean the better quality ones.
When I worked in a datacentre with thousands of servers, we had to replace one or two hard drives a day on average. And that was high-end ultra-reliable SCSI drives. Nearly all predictive failures rather than actual dying, but failing is failing. Out they went.
Unused hard drives are actually very secure if stored properly. The magnetic domains used to store data do not weaken significantly over time, that is a myth. Though it may become true as recording densities rise in the future? There is a theory that the lubrication dries up if they aren't used for many years, but I've not encountered that myself. Even if that does happen there are ways to get them spinning. The data itself remains intact.