On 08/05/14 21:29, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 05/08/2014 12:39 PM, compdoc wrote:
>>> I just wanted to ask if "43 years" is a typo
>>
>> Cant imagine data being useful after that amount of time...
>
> Kids these days... How about data from NASA missions of the 1970's?
> Remember when they were looking for ancient tape drives on eBay?

I work in space science.

Those issues are exactly the reason I beat on our people that they can't 
be complacant and leave data on old tapes (which they will do, given 
half a chance, as it's cheaper to ignore old data).

NASA policy _now_ is that budgets for new projects must cover curating 
data from their predecessors.

Data can be migrated to new media fairly easily if you do it as you 
retire the old stuff, but coming back to it 10 years later is an 
exercise in pain - because the hardware to read the media often doesn't 
exist.

As an example of this, I had someone show up a few days ago with an old 
RLL hard drive that has material on it they may want. We have no way of 
connecting it up to read it. Another scientist has a garage full of 9 
track tapes and some vague ambition to migrate the data and another 
group have 1200 Exabyte cartridges full of ESA data which they claim 
will be readable for the forseeable future, despite the only exabyte 
drive left in the organisation being faulty.

To make matters worse on the Exabyte front, the data format is 
nonstandard, using a windows program (only runs on W95) which reads 
entire tapes at a time. It's not simply a matter of copying what's on 
the tapes to LTO6.



AB



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