[Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
[Main General Bulletin Board | BBFAQ |
Prev by Date | Next by Date | Post Followup ]
Member Login / Signup - Members see fewer ads. - Latest Member Gallery Photos
Re: Laptop Purchase Question from a Dinosaur Posted by Sarunas [Email] (#804) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Sarunas) on Fri, 16 Nov 2018 07:20:29 In Reply to: Laptop Purchase Question from a Dinosaur, EGD [Profile/Gallery] , Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:37:14 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
Many options for storage have already been mentioned, from thumb/flash drives to "cloud". They will all work for short-term storage such as regular backups or sharing between computers. I would use an external USB SSD hard drive for its speed and reliability. Your new laptop might have USB Type-C (USB-C) ports — these narrow-slit, symmetrical connectors. It would make sense then to look for the same USB-C interface on your storage device, which would make for the most hassle-free cabling.
If by storage you mean long-term, archival backups, then it's a different stroy. See for example an old article on Ars Technica by Jim Slater on "Bitrot and Atomic COWs...". In a nutshell, bits of information will rot over time, and some files will become damaged. In case of binary (photos, videos) they may become unreadable or useless just because of one-bit flip from 0 to 1. Having RAID doesn't help here. This can be addressed with modern self-healing, per-bit checksumming filesystems. I don't know of any available storage devices using that. There might (and should!) be some, but the anti-bitrot feature might be hidden behind some marketing gimmick name. They are not hard to DIY (just like building your own PC from parts) and I have built a few for $WORK and for home.
Another option for long term storage would be "M-DISC" Blu-ray discs. The material they use for recording bits is supposed to last over a 1000 years. Conventional CD/DVD/BR media can (and often does!) decay into unreadable state within several years. Recording M-DISCs requires a compatible M-DISC BR-writing device, though most current BR writers should support this.
HTH
_______________________________________ 2011 9^3 Turbo^4 XWD (current) 2007 9^3 2.0T SS 2002 9^3 SE 1998 9^5 2.3t
No Site Registration is Required to Post - Site Membership is optional (Member Features List), but helps to keep the site online
for all Saabers. If the site helps you, please consider helping the site by becoming a member.