"Mayayana"
news alt.windows7.general, wrote:

"Nil" wrote

| I'm surprised that so many people say that. I've
| *never* tried an old CD/DVD that I couldn't read. Last
| week I was backing up email to a database, going
| back 10 years. All the disks were fine.
|
| Me, too. I have hundreds of CDRs and DVDRs and I could probably
| count on one hand the number of them that have gone bad... and
| usually that's because of physical damaged caused by me. I'm sure
| I've had proportionally more hard disks go bad.

This got me to thinking. I decided to try my
oldest USB stick. Macally 256 MB. I'm not sure
how old it is. Probably 10 years. Maybe more.
It doesn't show up at all. The system doesn't
see it. All these years it's just been sitting on
a shelf over my desk, with the cap on.
That's my hesitancy about USB sticks and
hard disks. Magnetic storage. I don't really
understand how it works, but it seems that
it has to be less durable than grooves in plastic.
And maybe it's susceptible to magnetic fields?
I don't know.

The USB stick, depending on the actual ram chip is also subject to
another form of bitrot. And, due to the way in which magnetic media
works, it can lose data over time, without you actually having to
take an active role in it. The magnetism effect isn't forever and
does wear off over time, especially if the drive isn't used. As a
result, whatever data was stored in various spots that have already
lost their signal, is gone.

You can see this best with floppy disks though. Over time, years in
some cases depending on manufacturer, your data would slowly
disappear. As the mangetically stored data wasn't exactly stored in a
permanent way.


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