[game_preservation] Long-Term Storage

[Andrew Armstrong]

I've not seen this discussed, thought it might be interesting to know 
what people used for long-term storage of anything (not just preserving 
our games. Because of course we can't remove the media from the CD's 
legally or some rubbish ;-) ).

Okay, I myself am poor (both at backing up long term and in the money 
sense). I use external HDD's to backup, not that much space, I want to 
get TB drives (I have one old one I use, but the others are like 250GB, 
not enough!). For more-or-less static stuff, I use DVD's to back the 
stuff up.

I did wonder if the price/performance point of this kind of media was 
worthwhile *ever* considering the rate of change in technology:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/27/delkin_200_year_bluray_disc/

£125 a pop. Worth it more then 2 DVD's every X number of years for some 
data?

It doesn't seem any more worth then HDD's (of any type, although solid 
state have inherent advantages).

In any case, for preservationists I do wonder what is used - I hope it 
isn't just tape backups, which are rapidly going out of fashion and space :)

I presume it's mainly based around automated data redundancy and 
checking (so yet more redundancy if something fails).

Well, for hobbists it's going to be a lot smaller scale. It's 
interesting seeing the extremes :) and if any company starts providing a 
proper long-term (and well tested) solution to hardware failure, at a 
more reasonable cost :)

Andrew