Gadgetory

you know I think we've all been a little spoiled by digital data storage if you put something on your hard drive SSD or a writable CD if that's still your thing for whatever reason you can expect to be able to pull it up again whatever you want with every bit exactly where it's supposed to be but despite the relative reliability of digital data storage compared to the days when we consumed everything on cassette tapes and VHS data stored our modern media can still decay degrade and disappear so alliteration aside how does this happen and what can you do to prevent it let's start by a look at mechanical hard drives which although more economical than solid-state drives can fail due to the moving parts on the inside wearing out or through damage to the platters if something like a head crash happens but suppose you've got a dependable hard drive that you take good care of by not subjecting it to shock moisture or your pet ferret how could data on the drive decay without any kind of physical damage or mishap you see hard drive stored data as clusters of magnetic bits that are pointed in a certain direction that have the potential to flip to the opposite direction over time however since modern hard drives have built-in features to periodically refresh those bits of data and they also have error checking algorithms that can often detect and fix flipped bits this kind of data rot is mostly a problem for drives that have been sitting around unplugged for 5 or 10 years at a time so the average user probably won't have to worry about this all that much but it can matter if you're using hard drives for very long term archival style storage SSDs on the other hand can be quite a bit more fickle with retaining data for long periods of time although SSDs are often regarded as more durable than hard drives through their lack of moving parts they don't hold data as well because they rely on trapping and electrical charge inside of a small transistor these charges can weaken over time and while making transistors smaller and smaller have increased capacities it has also decreased data longevity although you can fight this off by making sure to not leave your SSD unplugged for long periods of time and just powering it on regularly they do tend to not last as long as hard drives went unplugged if you live in a warmer climate your SSD might not even hold data for more than like a year if you aren't using it as heat can accelerate data decay in those transistors so make sure you're not doing stuff like leaving a laptop with an SSD in the back of a hot car for long periods of time like you go on a trip or something but luke what if I just store all of my super important stuff on optical discs you don't exactly have to turn on a CD so isn't that a better idea well yes and no optical discs unfortunately are also susceptible to degradation and a number of ways just different ways such as oxidization of the metallic layer that actually holds the data when air seeps in through imperfections in the outer plastic layer of the disk adhesives that hold the different layers of a disk together can break down over time as well even making it possible to physically pull apart of the disk like some kind of weird sandwich however you can get archival quality discs engineered with more durable materials that can reliably store data for between 20 and a hundred years depending on how exactly they're manufactured and there's even a relatively new type of optical disc called the M disc that claims it can store data for a thousand years whoa but since no long term storage solution is perfect the best way to make sure your important stuff lasts as long as you want it to is make sure that you have independent redundant backups whether that's your home or with a cloud-based archival service and remembering things like not to leave your drive sitting around or using them as paper weights if something's really that important I hear that stone tablets might be making 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