[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-24 16:30:46 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> I meant what I said about bitrot BTW; I've just retired a HP USB stick 
> which had started flipping the bits in some files which had been 
> unchanged on the USB stick for a while; the verify pass caught it after 
> some unrelated files were added to the same backup partition on the USB 
> stick.

Um, so?   CD and DVD media also degrades, too.  Sometimes badly.   I've 
had mis-recorded DVD disks arrive locally, and have had verified media 
fail in short order.   Batches of bad media from well-known vendors 
have occurred, too.   Some of the 9-track tape media shed the recording 
substrate all over the spools and all over the tape drive heads.   
You've undoubtedly experienced other problems and other failures with 
other media, as have other folks.

If you're heading back into ancient history with your support and your 
configuration — as little as five and certainly ten years now qualifies 
for that, much to the chagrin of some of us old fossils — then your 
site needs to make your own plans for media and the rest.   That 
archiving may well involve making your own copies onto whatever 
archival storage is locally preferred.   Maybe migrating the kits over 
to InfoServer and allowing those to be picked up by your normal 
archival processing from there, for instance.

Then there's the issue of still being able to access the media and to 
decode the formats of the archives and to access the data — CD and DVD 
media are clearly on the way out, but that's fodder for another 
discussion — and it might well be that the contents of some ten or 
fifteen year old distribution archive isn't even usable on 
current-generation hardware.  We're not in the same world that 
VAX-11/VMS got its start in, to demonstrate my hammer-lock of the 
obvious.

Life sucks, and then your backups die.


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