How To Properly Archive Data On Disc Media 120
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, the well-known Free Software Magazine author, goes into great detail on CD/DVD media over at the Ad Terras Per Aspera site. McFarland covers the history of the media, from CDs through recordable DVDs, explaining the various formats and their strengths and drawbacks. The heart of the article is an essay on the DVD-R vs. DVD+R recording standards, leading to McFarland's recommendation for which media he buys for archival storage. Spoiler: it's Taiyo Yuden DVD+R all the way. From the article: 'Unlike pressed CDs/DVDs, burnt CDs/DVDs can eventually fade, due to five things that affect the quality of CD media: sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices (please keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media).'"
Dupe... (Score:5, Informative)
Patrick McFarland? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, just seemed fishy to me. That's my $0.02.
Re:Why bother with optical? (Score:3, Informative)
Good experience with DVD-Rs myself (Score:4, Informative)
Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=1733269&p
Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].
The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33 [cdfreaks.com]
Fails to mention MO (Score:3, Informative)
- http://md5.ca/~pavel/md.jpg [md5.ca]
- http://tinyurl.com/2cu7zv [tinyurl.com]
MO drives are a bit costly, but if you have important media its worth it. Besides cool look for neo's warez stash in Simulcara book. Quoted guaranteed archival time is over 40 years in most cases, and they continually improving the technology, compared to driving the costs down of the generic blank media market of CDs/DVDs.
Re:Patrick McFarland? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:DVD Writable sucks badly as archival technology (Score:2, Informative)