archiving data, was RE: Media Longitevity/Care (Long perhaps OT)

[woodelf]

William Donzelli wrote:

>>The key is to always keep
>>a bit ahead of the problem rather than waiting until
>>the problems such as NASA has with old tapes that
>>can no longer be read with tape drives that rarely
>>work in any case.
>>    
>>
>
>This is a myth. Every bit of every mission is available on CD-ROM. The
>original telemetry tapes are crap, but the data was pulled off them many
>years ago.
>
>  
>
I thought the problem was they got the data ... but lost the software to 
read the encoded
data from the tapes ... I think this was mars lander data.
Ben alias woodelf