50 cents US a gigabyte

[gwpriester]

http://www.woot.com/offers/centon-128gb-datastick-sport

A 128 gb data stick for $65. These thing keep getting cheaper and cheaper.

On the other hand they are very slow so more than 8-16 GB is probably a waste.

[Rik]

Not just cheaper, Gary.
But, smaller as well.

I've got a 16Gb one on my keyring that's 23mm long and 15mm wide.
It really is small enough to have on your keyring!

[gwpriester]

Yeah, I have two. A 16GB and a 64GB. But I don't think I will use the 64GB. It's just too slow to copy any large files to it.

[handrawn]

could be useful for those with uncompressed music and other very large files, where you are talking about transfer or storage rather than inline usage and portability and footprint is more important than speed

[pauland]

The comments are entertaining.

My favourite is "Who goes swimming with roughly 100 billion bytes of data in their pocket anyway?"

Regarding the speed. At the dawn of my computing career we would have drooled over the speed and considered the capacity as science fiction (which it would have been then).

[handrawn]

the speed issue may resolve - Hard drives up in the multi-terabyte region are not always that fast either, relatively speaking

I'd be interested to know how hard these datastick devices are for archival purposes...

[Rik]

Speed issues and whether they're hard or not, aside.
I carry mine for when I need to copy something from one computer to another.
Or, someone has a file that you would like - spreadsheet, word, photos etc...

So, it comes in vary handy to have mine with me on my keyring.
Particularly when the stick is that small!

As for the 'hard' question. CDs and DVDs are not supposed to be hard - as in permanent storage.
Or is that a myth?!

[pauland]

There's an irony that with all the digital formats replacing analog, we are in danger of losing so much material that would otherwise be preserved. Domestic printers with inferior print longevity compared to photographs, digital articles that exist only on some website, only to be lost when the hosting account is closed. All the family digital family photographs and home movies, sitting on one hard drive, waiting for a fault.

So many people have digital assets that are easily lost - particularly when someone forgets about them or even dies - even lost passwords can mean the end of a digital asset.

Returning to CDs and DVDs - there have been stories about CD and DVD rot and there was a lot of news coverage about some manufacturers that would over time degrade the information layer or cloud the transparent layer making them unusable.

Never heard of anyone having a current problem.

Back in the day the BBC launched a Domesday project using laserdisc. Recently they managed to get some of that data back and put it online. It did highlight the real problem - no so much the media, but the formats and organisation and equipment required to be able to read those discs. Eventually they will become so obsolete they won't be viable as an archive medium because nothing will be able to read them or make sense of the content.

I have a number of files kicking around from long-forgotten software in formats I don't recognise. To all intents and purposes they are gone.

[skech]

From what I have read the best future storage medium is diamonds or specifically nitrogen atoms within flawed diamonds; When a nitrogen atom is next to an empty spot in a diamond's carbon framework, it lets off an extra electron, leaving that electron free to have its quantum played around with. This could lead in the future to quantum computing. But I cannot find any information on the doomsday scenario shown in HG Wells Time Machine, how would information be stored for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. At the moment they say that storing on DVDs CDs etc is very limited firstly from the point of view of degradation of the medium and from the inevitability of their being nothing to play the dvd etc. You would have to build a 'self playing' media which would not need any other equipment to recover the data including external power sources, who is to say that the concept of electricity as we see it today would be around in a million years time. The only viable alternative is migration of data, from books scanned into digital data to VHS tapes turned into dvds, but again with this scenario someone has to be there throughout the years to migrate the data with some form of lossless conversion.

[Rik]

5.25" was my first experience of floppy discs, on the BBC Microcomputer.
Where are they now?
Even if you did have one, is there any current hardware that would allow you to connect the appropriate drive?
And then have anything that can run any software that could read the discs?

PNGs and JPGs and GIFs etc. may well be formats that last a long time.
But, the media they are stored on, may be too outdated to be useful in the future!

Well, someone has to make money from converting you files from one type of media onto another.
Like putting your VHS onto DVD.
So, I suppose when you see someone offering that type of service, it's time to get wise and do what you need to do.