Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Chris Devers wrote:

> Tapes are fragile too, but if cared for reasonably well it seems like they
> can work for decades. Will that be true for hard drives & CDs?

True for the old-fashioned 9-track tapes. But newer formats are more 
problematic; just try to find a new drive that can actually read a 10 
year old tape. Your 10 year old drive won't help, either. For starters, 
it's probably worn out, and you can't get replacement parts. If it does 
work, it won't be compatible with any computers you have. It probably 
requires interfaces that current computers no longer offer, and over on 
the Windows side of the world, there won't be any drivers for any OS 
version less than 5 years old.

(How bleak the picture is depends in part on what part of the market 
you're looking at. 10 year old low-end tape formats are completely 
hopeless; they were QIC tape and data cassette, both of which are 
completely defunct now. As for the big enterprise stuff, you were 
looking at either 8mm or DDS-1; you might be able to get drives that can 
read those for a couple more years. But the argument still applies; it 
just pushes the drop-dead time out a bit. Besides, for a business of the 
scale we're discussing here, you're probably not going to be looking at 
tape systems in the $4,000 class.)

CD-R and DVD-R are actually better bets in that regard, because CDs and 
DVDs are so popular. It is likely that readers will continue to be 
available for a long time to come, because of the popularity of the 
medium for both data and entertainment. Just watch out for weird 
proprietary backup file formats, as there may be no software available 
to read them.

Longevity of the media is a different issue, and perhaps a problem. 
Certainly cheap CD-Rs are a poor bet for long-term storage. Aging tests 
suggest that the good ones will last at least 50 years, but the 
real-world results aren't in yet. The picture is even less clear for 
DVD-R, since it is so new.