Category:
Technology
Archiving Personal Data
Your backups are rotting on the shelf—right now. One bit flip away from losing family photos forever. Here’s how optical media saves the day.
The Problem
When was the last time the backups were refreshed? Old hard drives, SSDs, thumb drives, and USBs quietly ticking away on the shelf aren’t as safe as they seem. Over time all digital storage is vulnerable to data rot, where information degrades bit by bit, making files unreadable over years. This means valuable photos, videos, documents, and archives could simply vanish because the underlying media slowly fails.