As important documentation piles up, the importance of high volume storage solutions increases. Here are five excellent solutions to manage your data for the long term:
1. HDD magnetic hard drives
This is the type of computer hard drive that people have been using for their PCs, office computers, laptops and portable storage for decades. It is extremely reliable and inexpensive. However, data on an HDD drive can be destroyed or corrupted if the magnetic discs therein are subjected to the wrong conditions.
2. Optical discs
Although mp3s have overtaken CDs as the primary medium for listening to music and online streaming is becoming the primary way to watch movies, optical discs are still very useful. Modern Blu-ray discs can store over a terabyte of data, making them as capable as portable hard drives.
If you are going to use optical discs as a long term data preservation solution, you must be very careful with the discs, because scratches caused by mishandling or improper storage can damage information. Also, the most reliable optical discs cannot be rewritten, so you can't add, remove or edit anything once you add data to one.
3. SSD flash storage
You use some sort of flash storage every single day, even if you don't know it. Flash storage is used as a reliable storage solution for cell phones, computers, flash drives and other devices. Since it relies on electricity to store and transfer data instead of moving parts, it can preserve data more reliably and transfer information faster. An SSD drive can be so tough, in fact, that many flash memory manufacturers advertise their products as being weather proof, dust proof, waterproof and shock proof.
SSD flash storage is not only more reliable than other physical data preservation solutions, but it is also more versatile. With flash memory, you can store hundreds of gigabytes on a device smaller than a dime.
Flash memory is certainly an exceptional storage solution, but at about six times the cost of HDD memory, flash memory is also the most expensive.
4. Hybrid storage
If you want a long term data preservation solution that can transfer data with speeds similar to SSD flash memory, but with a price closer to that of HDD memory, then you should consider hybrid memory. This type of storage combines SSD and HDD technologies by using a magnetic drive for long-term storage and a relatively small amount of flash memory to increase the data transfer rate.
Although it is not as fast and reliable as flash memory or quite as inexpensive as magnetic memory, hybrid storage provides some of the best benefits of both.
5. The cloud
Cloud services, which are backed up by massive data banks that you don't even have to manage, allow you to store and access a virtually unlimited amount of data for as long as you need to. Thanks to lightning fast internet speeds that can transfer gigabytes of data in mere seconds, the cloud is an incredibly feasible data storage solution. What's more, the high level of security and mobile access to stored data that cloud storage solutions offer make them even more appealing. In fact, these benefits make the cloud the ultimate long term data preservation solution.
The best long term storage solutions are digital, so prepare your documents
In order for you to take advantage of any of these long term data preservation solutions, you need to first make all of your data digital. Fortunately, this is a fairly easy thing to do, as long as you have the right set of document scanning and management tools.
