"can't go wrong" storage device

[BioHazard90]

Is there any kind of "can't go wrong" storage device that won't ever fail? Hard drives always fail sooner or later.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

well, some high-end servers use a RAID-5 Array (Striping with Parity) which has massive storage capacity (Sum of all drives minus the parity drive) and if one drive fails, the RAID array will keep on working because the data on the broken drive is moved over to the parity drive straight away. This is as close to 'can't go wrong' as ive ever seen.

SSDs are resistant to shock and have fast access speeds, but the chips deteriorate faster than conventional magnetic disks.

 

[JCB1]

hard drives will always fail

You can use RAID 5 to protect your disks, this way if disks fail its ok as other disks that were on standby take over

 

[cboucher]

All storage media will fail. The key is good back up practices. Save anything important in a couple different places.

 

[BioHazard90]

Of course you want to use good backup practices, and of course no storage media is absolutely failsafe, but some storage media are more failsafe than others, so I'm just trying to sort that out. Remember those old IOmega removable hard drives years ago that suffered from "click death"? You just want to stay on top of technology changes to be as safe as you can, hopefully as affordably as possible.

So what do you think about Secure Digital cards or Solid State drives? Would either of these be suitable for a relatively failsafe backup device?

 

[cboucher]

Tape backup is still pretty reliable these days...

 

[root]

So what do you think about Secure Digital cards or Solid State drives? Would either of these be suitable for a relatively failsafe backup device?

don't ever use an SD card or solid state drive for a long term archive device.

the way that this technology works is that bits are stored as charges in NAND flash memory.
if you remove the power then over time this charge dissipates, erasing all the data with it.

e.g. if you put all your data on an SSD drive or SD card and put it on a shelf, when you come back to it ten years later there won't be any data on it any more. because the charge would have never been refreshed.

 

[Indigo]

The only failproof backup, as was stated, is to have your critical stuff in multiple locations.

Take me for example. The things I can't live without are stored on my desktop PC, which is backed up to WHS, and also has a mirrored placement on my Server 2008 R2 box, which has RAID 5. On top of that, I burn all critical things to either BluRay or DVD DL. It's not impossible, just highly unlikely, that all of my backups will go down at the same time, so I'm relatively safe.