I am quite convinced that in the next few years, the general population on this planet on the whole is going to be losing a lot of data. Why?
Everything is going digital.
All communications, media, personal records - they are all going digital. When was the last time you used a traditional silver halide film camera? And as of now, there is no ideal storage technology that comes close to paper or cloth in terms of reliability and robustness.
Under the most ideal storage conditions, Kodak CD-ROM can last 217 years. In most cases, they don’t go beyond 20 years. http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Kodak.html
Most families have no idea what is the best method of storing data - backup hardisk fail pretty frequently. And when they do, it is extreme grief for the victims.
About 2 years ago I built my little VIA-based 600GB RAID 5 file storage server. A few months ago, one of the hardisk went down (RAID 5 still runs fine with 1 failed hardisk, albeit in degraded mode) , and as a stop gap measure, I bought 2 1T hardisk, copied the data to the 1T hardisk and did manual mirroring.
Now, to keep my 2 portable disk in sync, I’m using RSync. http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/#Rsync
I’ll need to find a more optimal solution soon.
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