The vast majority of blank optical media (blank CD's and DVD's) sold today are of very low quality.
It’s very easy to tell if the spindle of blank DVDs you just bought are junk or not. Look at the sides of the discs in the stack. Do you see lumps, bumps and inconsistencies?
If the answer is yes, they’re low quality. Don’t bother returning them because every spindle you buy will be like that unless you go with a specific brand which I’ll mention in a moment.
Truly good optical discs have no imperfections that can be seen by the naked eye. So should you pop over to staples or best buy and look through all the spindles of optical discs? probably not.
You know from above that off-the-shelf media today are going to fail, much the same way floppy diskettes failed at the end of their tenure. Manufacturers churn these things out without any consideration of quality file writes or reads for the long haul, they are not a "long term solution"
If you do opt to use CD or DVD media, don’t plan on having anything last for longer than 2 to 3 years at most before read failure. It doesn’t matter if you have the best optical drive available, because there’s nothing you can do to stop the breakdown of the quality over time.
HARD DRIVE
One of the leading hard drive manufacturers Western Digital used to offer lifetime warranties on consumer PC hard drives, they stopped. Why?
There was a point in time when any Western Digital Hard Disk Drive you bought had a lifetime warranty. Then WD knocked that down to 7 years. Then 5 years. Then for some models 3 or even just 1!
What happened is that the manufacturing process changed, and certain components on the inside of the Hard Disk Drive that used to be made from metal were changed to plastic.
I’m not saying WD drives are bad because I use them myself, but the phrase "they don’t make ‘em like they used to" definitely applies.
As a testament to this, there are still 286 PCs (circa 1982) out there that when started, the drive takes a really long time to spin up, it’s really loud once running, but it amazingly still works almost 30 years later and all the data is accessible and ready to rock. I seriously, seriously doubt hard drives made today will be able to boast that 30 years from now.
In February 2007, Google Inc. released a study that they conducted on their own computers entitled Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. According to this study, which was the most extensive of it's kind ever completed, hard drives are most likely to fail if they are less than 3 months old, or more than 2 years old.
2 years!?
The best way to make a hard drive last as long as possible is to use two. A smaller hard drive for the operating system and a large one for storage. If you're not already doing this ask your IT technician about it, if you don't have one, we can help. This is a time-honored way of computing and it does allow for HDDs dedicated to storage to last longer than 2 years, but it's not an alternative to a backup, it's just better than one hard drive.
As for how much longer, standard fare is 3 to 5 years. A dedicated storage HDD will last for 5 or greater before showing signs of eminent doom. Doom that doesn't scream "hey I'm dying in here" until well, it's much too late. Luckily IT tech's have tools that measure the drive's S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring and Reporting Tools) and can determine when a drive's on it's last legs, but only if they see it BEFORE that time comes.
And yes there are plenty of instances where people have had hard drives last well beyond the 7-year mark, however it’s never wise to assume that you will achieve that just because someone else did.
Heck lots of people have crossed the lake in early April because the ice looked thick enough, you want to go out on the ice too?
TAPEDRIVE
One word. NO. Not economical, not reliable, not cost effective, not easy to manage, not inexpensive, not an option.
USB sticks have been around long enough to prove that they can definitely withstand the test of time better than any other immediately available affordable storage media.
If you write data to a USB stick, toss it in a drawer then 8 years later go to use it again, it will work. A hard drive used that way is an iffy prospect at best and I’d never trust optical media to last that long even with premium brands.
I’ll put it to you this way: If I were making a time capsule and wanted to put some data in it, I’d use nothing but USB sticks if I wanted something I could retrieve two decades later and have relative assurance it would still work and not have decayed beyond being usable.
The only known thing that can kill a USB stick is either unmounting it improperly (pulling it out while it's still being written to or read from) or running out of file writes as it does have a predetermined limit - yes you read that right, predetermined number of file writes. USB sticks, as with Memory cards for camera's, cell phones and camcorders have a pre-determined number of writes, somewhere in the multi-billions before they simply give up. And to my knowledge there's no odometer that says "almost done" when it's time to move on.
If it sounds like I’m telling you to burn discs less and use Flash media more, I am. Flash sticks don’t suffer from scratches or any damage from being a moving part because it doesn’t move.
But that being said if you're looking for something for regular daily use I wouldn't trust a USB stick much longer than a year before I switched to a new one.
CONCLUSION
So wait, what's the answer? Hard Drives aren't built like they used to be, optical discs aren't long term enough, usb sticks only work if you well, don't plan on actually using them, what's the right answer?
A combination actually. A combination of a local USB flash stick backup of the most important files swapped for a new stick on a yearly basis And a hard drive backup, but not your hard drive, someone else's, somewhere else.
While 80% of computer failures are caused by hard drive crashes, the other 20% are not, the other 20% are fire, flood, theft or sabotage. And if your USB stick backup and backup hard drive are plugged into your computer when the Fire, Flood, Theft or sabotage occur, you've just lost everything.
My real recommendation is use USB sticks daily or weekly to store the most critical data and an online backup solution (which backs up to someone else's hard drives somewhere else out of the way of fire, flood, theft and most cases of sabotage).
But aren't someone else's hard drives just as likely to fail as your own? Yes, but online backup companies know that and prepare for it, everything you ask them to backup is backed up to not one but two hard drives at the same time, and the drives themselves are traded out for newer drives every 2-3 years depending on their previous failure track record.
Worried about security? The security practices that REPUTABLE online backup companies use to store your data, is the same grade of security that the US and Canadian military use to store their data, I won't go into nitty gritty details but you know the story of a million monkey's on a million typewriters? Well all you'd get is a lot of banana peels to compost.
So if you're not sure the backup solution you're already using is "ideal" for your business needs, give us a call, we'd be happy to discuss the details and provide a solution.
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