I’m old enough that we used floppy and then CD/DVD drives for storage, and then flash drives and external hard drives. But I recently was told those aren’t good long term storage options (ex: family photos or sensitive documents). Why are they poor options for long term storage, and what should be used instead?
In: Technology
All media degrades over time, and some are susceptable to corruption and complete loss from light, moisture, magnets, and time itself. It’s called “bit rot”. Over time everything degrades. When using physical media and storing data on an incredibly tiny area, even a speck of dust or an errant radioactive particle could corrupt data.
Flash storage works like a bunch of light switches. One for each 0 and 1. A super tiny blip of electricity turns it on or off. There are billions of them. So they are fast to read and write, but like real light switches, they have a lifetime of a certain number of flips before they break. Even more so, the static from your finger could fry millions of those switches instantly.
Older disks had the same issue, but they were more like paper scrolls. As long as the scroll itself was okay and didn’t fall apart, and the ink was still readable, the it could be read, but light, magnets, and other things “fade” that magnetic “ink”.
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