Don't get your hopes up too high for ssd. I had one fail within 4 months of buying it - and the company's attitude was 'this sometimes happens'. Yum

I think George is right - punched cards in two separate locations. (Hell any form of paper output will do - surely they'll have decent OCR in 100 years time)?

Adrian 

Sent from my iPhone

On 13 Dec 2012, at 02:32, Dale Tronrud <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 12/12/2012 3:19 PM, Bosch, Juergen wrote:
>> Hey Dale,
>> 
>> you really should get your personal RAID with hot swappable discs, since you don't like Firewire, how about Thunderbolt and a
>> Pegasus RAID with 6 bays ? If a drive fails you replace it with a new one.
> 
>   Last summer someone in the lab above ours decided they needed a full
> sink of water.  Before this task was complete they decided they needed
> to go home.  The resulting flood destroyed the contents of the desks of
> two of our lab members.  That was a lot of paper that didn't make 100
> years - including a "Handbook of Chemistry and Physics" that had almost
> made 60.
> 
>   If the lab RAID had been under the waterfall it would have lost all
> of its drives in one go.  I don't know how big a RAID number you have
> to have to survive that, but RAID-5 isn't going to do it.
> 
>   I have run a flash drive through my washing machine a couple times
> and it is still going strong so I have high hopes for solid-state
> memory.  It will be several years before 1 TB SSD's drop in price
> enough for the next move of my little archive.  The SanDisk "Memory
> Vault" that started this thread maxes out at 16 GB.
> 
> Dale Tronrud
> 
>> 
>> By the way if anybody has a functional DAT4 tape drive, could I send you one to read out a tape with some data ? If so, then off
>> list reply would be nice, thanks.
>> 
>> Jürgen
>> 
>> On Dec 12, 2012, at 5:22 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote:
>> 
>>>   I don't believe there is a solution that does not involve active
>>> management.  You can't write your data and pick up those media 25
>>> years later and expect to get your data back -- not without some
>>> heroic effort involving the construction of your own hardware.
>>> 
>>>   I have data from Brian Matthews' lab going back to the mid-1970's
>>> and those data started life on 7-track mag tapes.  I've moved them
>>> from there to 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, to 9-track 6250 bpi tapes, to
>>> just about every density of Exabyte tape, to DVD, and most recently
>>> to external magnetic hard drives (each with USB, Firewire, and eSATA
>>> interfaces).  The hard drives are about five years old and so far
>>> are holding up.  Last time I checked I could still read the 10 year
>>> old DVD's.  I'm having real trouble reading Exabyte tapes.
>>> 
>>>   Write your data to some medium that you expect to last for at least
>>> five years but anticipate that you will then have to move them to
>>> something else.
>>> 
>>>   Instead of spending time working on the 100 year solution you should
>>> spend your time annotating your data so that someone other than you
>>> can figure out what it is.  Lack of annotation and editing is the
>>> biggest problem with old data.
>>> 
>>> Dale Tronrud
>>> 
>>> P.S. If someone needs the intensities for heavy atom derivatives of
>>> Thermolysin written in VENUS format, I'm your man.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12/12/2012 1:57 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
>>>> Better option? Certainly not TAPE or electromechanical disk drive. CD's and DVD's don't last nearly that long and James Holton
>>>> has pointed out.
>>>> 
>>>> I suppose there might be a "cloud" solution where you rely upon data just floating around out there in cyberspace with a life of
>>>> its own.
>>>> 
>>>> Richard
>>>> 
>>>> On Dec 12, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Dale Tronrud wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>  Good luck on your search in 100 years for a computer with a
>>>>> USB port.  You will also need software that can read a FAT32
>>>>> file system.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Dale "Glad I didn't buy a lot of disk drives with Firewire" Tronrud
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 12/12/2012 1:02 PM, Richard Gillilan wrote:
>>>>>> SanDisk advertises a "Memory Vault" disk for archival storage of photos that they claim will last 100 years.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> (note: they do have a scheme for estimating lifetime of the memory, Arrhenius Equation ... interesting. Check it out:
>>>>>> www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/ <http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/> and click the Chronolock tab.).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Has anyone here looked into this or seen similar products?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Richard Gillilan
>>>>>> MacCHESS
>> 
>> ......................
>> Jürgen Bosch
>> Johns Hopkins University
>> Bloomberg School of Public Health
>> Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
>> Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
>> 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708
>> Baltimore, MD 21205
>> Office: +1-410-614-4742
>> Lab:      +1-410-614-4894
>> Fax:      +1-410-955-2926
>> http://lupo.jhsph.edu
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>