Security has become a bigger issue in technology lately (has always been an issue), and I just read an article glorifying the abandonment of physical media storage. It sorta made me upset, because I don't like the way things are being pushed to soft copy only.

You have hard-drives, but they fail

You have the cloud, but I don't trust "their cloud (I prefer the My Cloud hard-drive by Western Digital if any).

Servers fail.

You have digital copies, but where do you store them? On a hard-drive?

I actually prefer CD or DVD over all of the above options. The worse that could happen is that they crack or you loose them, but with 2 backup CDs that hasn't been an issue for me (for important stuff). I have DVDs a decade old that I didn't have to worry about loosing the data with.

It's sorta the same reason I don't like paying for a promise. Nor do I like paying for a guarantee that isn't legally binding.

A big issue with storing data on paper was the fact that when it comes to large amounts of data, paper is insufficient.

But security wise, and backup wise, I think it is more efficient.

I always say that we pay too much for convenience. And I like to use old reliable methods more often than newer un-reliable methods. Most of the time I prefer the wisdom of the "hard but sure" way than the foolishness of the "new way."

There are times when I use the convenient way for it's convenience alone in a specific case.

This whole IRS fiasco, these site hacks and account stealing etc at "convenience" stores. It all doesn't make sense. When the power is out, people don't know what to do, and what if the internet went out? Would we have systems in place to continue to function?

Can cashiers add without a computer? Surely can't swipe your card under that magnetic block if the POS system is down.

Yes, I still desire a home phone. No, I don't have a contract phone, nor a cable bill, nor a television. Yes, I do have internet (my means of gathering information while I can). I have abandoned the library for the convenience of the internet.

If Steam, PSN, XBOX live go down, and they are pushing this interconnected game play, you are going to have a bunch of upset people. They hardly make any 2 player Co-op games anymore (LAN party friendly games).

Maybe this is why I have seen people buy safes?

And yet, it seems there is a push for digital currency? The day they get rid of cash, is the day the beginning of the end of the world is certain.

Sounds like a good video game. I should release it on Steam.

Should we be so reliant on computers?

P.S. If you say Soft Copy, please explain why.

I just store my important data copied on multiple places. I've got code that is on both github, assembla + my hard drive.

If it is something really important (a result from a scan of my body for example) I would store it on the cloud on my hard drive and on a physical disc.

I actually prefer CD or DVD over all of the above options

of course this is not always applicable.

Wait, what do you mean by hard copy and soft copy here? Local copy vs. server copy?

Personally I prefer to keep copies of my stuff in my own drives, I don't trust any service with my back-ups. I have uploaded back-ups to servers before (since there's always a risk of your local copies getting destroyed in a fire or something), but those were servers I had control over (e.g. my hosting), not some random "cloud" service. For the most part I just use my pendrives though.

If Steam, PSN, XBOX live go down, and they are pushing this interconnected game play, you are going to have a bunch of upset people.

I think the biggest issue here is DRM =P Those services are designed specifically to lock you out when you don't use them. This is directly at odds against long-term preservation.

If ink didn't cost do much, I'd probably print more. There is a lot of room for innovation in technology, and it seems mostly in the "accessories for smartphones" arena. But I'm not down with the "track everything I do" innovations.

I might need to buy that Z-ink printer. For got all about that until now.

https://www.zink.com

I hear GitHub is good for version control. But if I were running a major business, there is no real alternate solution for storage, other than servers. Of course, we could do paper, but environmentalist are loving the digital age so much. I'd probably get the red sticker (not green enough).

I like both.

There's one massive problem with hard-copy-only: paper burns. I work in an office where one group of people have paper-only files going back donkey's years. If there is a fire they are screwed. All those records are gone. If they had an electronic version of them, and and assuming it was reasonably designed, it would be searchable, it would be backed-up, it could be brought back on a DR site. As things stand they get none of that.

Despite that a paper copy is sometimes convenient (it's at least easier for me to read: the first thing I do when I get an important email that I need to pay attention to is print it). But the electronic copy is important.

@hedgehog (can't quote on this ipad)

A hard copy would be like paper, a book, even a cave drawing.

The "Dead-tree" format.

It says on Wikipedia that there is a saying that you can't "Grep dead trees," and I totally agree here as I have been working with regular expressions lately, and for searching for specific information In a large amount of data, computers are very good.

But one thing, you can't hack a dead-tree.

And dead trees don't crash (Wordplay).

For this reason I tend to keep a copy of my password on paper (I learned the hard way).

I do have a soft copy too, but the day the computer crashes, I have it backed up.

An idea I am getting all of a sudden is some type of backup code. A bar code of some sort with data that, when scanned represents a large amount of data.

QR codes are sorta like this. That way information can be saved to a hard copy and a soft copy at the same time.

Of course, ideas like this scare me.

Over the years I have lost so must data to hard drive failures it's unreal.

I hate using "remote hosting and data storage" ( what techies call "the cloud" now-a-days ) due to the fact that I have no clue how secure their servers are - or how trust worthy their employees are.

I keep backups on thumb drives, CDs, and paper. My important documents are stored in a fireproof safe.

I know back in the day, a company that I worked for, that handled transactions for most banks in the country, of course had massive computer systems where all data was stored on redundant arrays of hard drives. They had at least two physical locations where they stored data online like this. Then there was a backup rotation of all that data so that you had full set of everything on at least three different physical locations offline. Additionally there were daily jobs to make micro film cards with every transaction that were made in original for storing locally and a number of copies that were sent to every bank.

If that is something for paranoia? ;)

Regarding backups, I think that if you want to be fairly safe, make multiple copies of your data that you store on different physical locations. Never trust only one backup strategy.

1. Cloud storage may disappear or fail.

2. DVD and CD ROM may have a much shorter life span than you think. The layer that stores data is photo sensitive, so imagine what light can do to them over time. Also the coating on the top of such medium may not be so good, so you never know if the top layer will wear because of humidity etc, causing damage to the data.

3. Magnetic storage, that is hard drives, tapes, zip disks, floppies, etc, will slowly fade.

4. SSD drives will lose its memory over time.

5. Tape reels have a lot of other problems in addition, like inter-magnetic fields that over time makes the data fade, and the glue that is used to fix the magnetic particles may fuse together to a lump you can't pry apart again. Typically really old broadcasting reels that haven't seen the light of day in 50 years and such.

6. Standards change. One day you will have a nice HD, but no equipment to connect the drive, or impossible to get a new CD player to read your data, etc.

Basically you are out of luck, really, unless you regularly refresh your media.

So make off site and off line copies, and make sure you renew the copies (to a new medium) from time to time. Too many years, and the data are gone. How many of those old old floppies from the past is still working? 10 years ago? Probably okish. 20 years? Starting to get hard to retrieve the data now. 30 years? My old C64-floppies doesn't work any more...

Edit: Backup is costly, so how valuable is your data really? It may be a good idea to think about what kind of data you want to secure. Also I am getting older. (Not that old, really... not yet...) That makes me start to think about who am I storing these data for? Nobody will be interested in what I have on my hard drives when I am gone... I sure don't need them then.

I hate using "remote hosting and data storage" ( what techies call "the cloud" now-a-days ) due to the fact that I have no clue how secure their servers are - or how trust worthy their employees are.

You do know you can encrypt your files and fingerprint them, right? This is a solved problem - it doesn't matter how trustworthy the host is, just that it works properly and retrieves all your bits when you ask it to (which is of course a concern, making it useful only as secondary or even tertiary backup storage, but completely unrelated to security). It's really not hard.

In any case, data backup or archival is not a two-step process. Data, like everything else, needs to be cared for in order to survive. Fail to keep your backups to date and face the consequences (which are to try and recover your files once an accident occurs and finding that every single one of your backup sites has failed or is otherwise unrecoverable, either because of old age or because it never really worked in the first place but you never bothered to try recovering your files periodically).

I honestly feel like storing all my data on DVDs would be a mite bit crazy. That's over 200 4.8GB DVDs just to store a terabyte of data. That's 7 pounds of pure DVDs, almost a foot high (based on some random website). They just don't have the density for viable large-scale backup. Even at smaller scales, flash drives are more efficient in my book.

If you're serious about backing up all your stuff, the best solution is to have multiple vectors. Personally, I've never had a hard drive fail, but since that is a real threat, a RAID system of some kind coupled with a remote backup of some sort (cloud or another RAIDed machine) should be all you need. The odds of both your local store AND remote store simultaneously dying in a horrible accident are about as high as the odds of a tornado hitting your papers anyway. Unless a massive EMP destroys everyone's electronics, in which case your tax records are no longer terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

Because the zombies are coming.