[talk] Climate Mirror

[John C. Vernaleo]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2016, Pete Wright wrote:

>
>
> On 12/14/16 11:15 AM, Thomas Levine wrote:
>> The data don't need to be online; save them to a redundant bunch of
>> cheap hard drives (or maybe tapes), and distribute them among lots of
>> bookshelves. They can even be slow and small hard drives pulled from old
>> computers; we need to write to each one only once, we might need to read
>> from each one once, and we otherwise only need to turn them on once
>> every couple years to make sure that they're still intact. Maintain a
>> website with a list of the datasets, the datasets' checksums, and the
>> contact information for the people with the hard drives on their
>> bookshelves.
>> 
>> Note that this is my opinion only on how this project could be
>> implemented. I don't know enough about the datasets or the likely
>> effects of geopolitics on their implementation in order to comment as to
>> whether I think the project should be implemented.
>> 
>
> not to nit-pick but i would strongly recommend *against* using HDD's in this 
> manner (magnetic spinning ones, or SSD ones).  Drives are not designed to 
> reliably store data cold like this mechanically or electrically.  This is why 
> tapes are still in use to this day - they *are* designed for cold store.  And 
> if you do hit a bad sector it is quite possible to skip that sector and 
> continue reading data.
>
> This is coming from quite a bit first-hand experience where I've lost 
> data-sets which were in cold-storage on HDD's for about a year that were 
> totally lost, versus data on tapes which were in cold-store for around 
> 5-7years where we had few problems recovering our assets.
>
> -p
>

Yep.  That's why the high-e astrophysics archive at goddard (the only 
archive I know well) still uses tape for long term storage.