Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?
David S. H. Rosenthal · Queue · 2010
These days, we are all data pack rats. Storage is cheap, so if there’s a chance the data could possibly be useful, we keep it. We know that storage isn’t completely reliable, so we keep backup copies as well. But the more data we keep, and the longer we keep it, the greater the chance that some of it will be unrecoverable when we need it.