How long will a hard drive last for an archive?
NEW THOUGHTS — I have been thinking about how ” I ” would do this, and the easiest way I can think of is to use bootdisk.com to get a win98se boot disk, and partition the drive using FDISK into two parts – the biggest part would be C:, and a D: just over 1/2 the size of C: ( 2/3rds to 1/3rd roughly… ) This way you could use an older, simpler version of NORTON GHOST – about 2K3, which was given away free with many motherboards, and make your archive on C: in FAT32. Then, using ghost ( General Hardware Oriented System Transfere ) you use ghost ON A FLOPPY, to create a compressed image on D: — You can then use the floppy, in any computer ( boot from the Ghost floppy ) to get around NTFS problems, and re-magnetize C: a few times by taking the compressed image and placing it on C:. You could do this 5 times in a row to start with…. Then, you could make an image of C: every 10 or 15 years, and re-magnetize C: with the Ghost floppy another 5 times to refresh the magnetic domains on a c
