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Q: I have been scanning all our paper records & files, storing them on 1 computer, and backing up the files as pdfs (some jpegs & tiffs) on an external hard drive. At some point, I would like to store them on CDs? Flashdrives? … I want reliability, security & portability (i.e. save in the bank safe deposit box). I also want to be able to access them easily and on any current computer. Do you have any suggestions as to what hardware or features I should use for this kind of longer-term electronic file storage?

– Julie S.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: I commend you for trying to go-paperless, Julie.  We haven’t even managed to do that at Geek Central.  However, in order to do so, you need to have a plan in place, including, as you’re finding out, the issue of long-term storage of your electronic documents.  There are a number of issues that factor into the equation when choosing a medium, and there are a lot of things that most people don’t know about the media they use every day.  You might be a little surprised, so read-on, and please feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Let’s start with reliability.  I’m going to change it up a little bit and discuss it in terms of shelf-life.  We’re basically talking about how long you can expect to still be able to reliably read your files once they’re written to a given media.  Well, the sad answer is that there is absolutely NO reliable permanent storage media.  Any type of storage that you can think of is going to be subject to some sort of degradation as it suffers the ravages of time.  Magnetic media (tapes and disks) typically deteriorate at between 10 and 20 years, usually from one of two causes; the weakening of the magnetic charge that encodes the stored data or the magnetic material begins to separate and flake off of the plastic backing.  Optical media isn’t any better.  CDs and DVDs are embedded with an optically sensitive dye, into which are encoded the 1s and 0s that make up the data.  This dye is organically based, so shelf-life is limited.  Published life expectancies of these media are between 10 and 25 years, with ultra-conservative expectancy as low as 2 to 5 years, depending on the storage environment, handling, and frequency of use.  The life expectancy of flash memory seems to vary wildly, but my research shows that even the most conservative estimates of life expectancy are higher than magnetic or optical media, so long as you don’t use the media on a regular basis.  Even if the medium itself doesn’t fail, you must face the problem of all the support electronics aging as well; drive motors, head stepper motors, and even solid state electronics can all fail over time.  Even the USB port on your computer is only rated at 1500 insert/extract cycles.  Plus, popular and supported media formats come and go quickly in the world of technology.  How many floppy drives do you see these days?  They were in every computer just a few years ago.  Remember Zip disks?  Tape drives?  Bernoulli disks?  Jazz drives?  ‘Nuff said.

Enough gloom and doom?  Nope, let’s move on to portability, but I’m going to change that word too, and call it capacity.  Storage media have done an incredible thing since Thomas Edison first used foil cylinders to store crude voice recordings back in 1878.  Media have simultaneously gotten both larger (in capacity) and smaller (physically).  Disk storage for mainframe computers used to be the size of home appliances, and store a few thousand bytes.  Now we have flash chips the size of a fingernail that store 64 gigabytes.  It’s important to note that one reason capacity keeps expanding is because it’s being driven by the ever-expanding size of the files we’re trying to store.  Digital photographs, for example are now being produced by cameras with previously unheard of numbers of megapixels, resulting in individual pictures that can top 50 megabytes per shot.  Compare that to the 150-200 kilobytes created by the first generation of digital cameras.  I see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future.  The Blu-Ray, current king of optical media tops out around a very respectable 128 gigabytes, but you need special disks and a special drive to achieve that high-capacity, and the drive must still be operational when you want to retrieve your files.  There are new media types coming in the future, including those based on holograms, and quantum mechanics.  Who knows what capacity we’ll get from them?

So where does that leave you?  Well, about the only thing that I know of that can overcome all the shortcomings that I’ve burdened you with is the mysterious entity that the industry has labeled “The Cloud”.  That’s a rather loose term, which in this context refers to Internet file servers that are owned by businesses, and which are professionally maintained by expert IT people.  You pay for the storage you need, upload your files to their servers, and it becomes the company’s job to worry about all of the rest.  The company will ensure your data are backed up, so that in the event a disk fails your files are not lost.  The company is responsible for infrastructure upgrades as newer media types are invented, and it is company’s job to put security measures in place to keep your files safe from prying eyes.  This, by the way, is the ONLY solution that meets your criteria of “be able to access them easily and on any current computer.”  Cloud storage is a burgeoning business, and leaders in the field are only now starting to emerge.  If you opt to go this route, do your diligence before picking one, and be sure you familiarize yourself with all the company’s policies on privacy of your data, and what happens to your data if the company goes under, or when YOU “go under”.