Ideas for electronic archiving sought
Dear Doc Storage,
nice that you have answered the reader's question: "Ideas for electronic archiving wanted" so extensively.
You are not alone in your opinion that cloud storage and archiving should be treated with caution - we share this opinion.
We would accept your recommendation for TAPE as the right medium for internal archiving - put in the right context - as your personal opinion. But unfortunately your arguments conceal many disadvantages of tape technology (limited durability, high migration and maintenance costs for long-term use) - this makes your advice less than objective!
How one-sided your choice really is, however, is proven by the fact that you completely ignore the last part of the "reader's question": Or are there other, reasonable solutions?
Because yes, there is a third storage technology that offers many advantages, especially for long-term data storage. Optical storage, which, unlike tape libraries, can store large amounts of data for the long term and keep them safe. In the HIT / Facebook project (Speicherguide also reported on this) it has been proven that the recordable Blu-ray Disc offers many advantages to build up large data archives inexpensively and securely (with very low maintenance costs and even lower migration costs but with an incomparable compatibility across all generations of optical media). In order to avoid being too hasty to use a prejudice used by the technological competition, with which the optical technology will gladly be discredited, it should already be noted: professional Blu-ray media for long-term storage have little in common with CD and DVD media in the consumer market. This is proven by laboratory tests and real 20 year old recordable CDs, which we can still read in Blu-ray drives today !
We would be very pleased about a complementary and balanced view of the different storage technologies and would be happy to provide you with further information material.
With best regards
Dr. Jan Brustkern
Managing Director of INCOM Storage GmbH Bonn - for over 25 years specialized in digital archive media and solutions !
PS.: we look after hundreds of installations in Germany alone, some of which have been using optical media for archiving efficiently and permanently for well over a decade.