Noah O'Donoghue wrote:

Hi All,

After reading about bitrot and feeling guilty for storing my most valuable data on cheap drives (although with backups!) I've been thinking about moving to something more resilient.

Out of curiosity I googled "bitrot" and whilst there seems to be some usage of "bitrot" in relation to RAM; mostly it seems to be in the context of storage media. As a novice I found: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows... informative; but apart from a suggestion that it might be related to 'cosmic rays' and thermal magnetic effects; couldn't seem to find (a) a definition which is a measure of bitrot and (b) actual measures of this phenomenon in various media and differing conditions. Presumably as a probabilistic phenomenon; bitrot might be defined in terms of the half-life of the data ? regards Rohan McLeod