NIST Releases Study Of CD/DVD Longevity

dirkin writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a preliminary study of the potential lifespan of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The PDF study is here. A good starting point for deciding what type of media to purchase to keep those backups and photos kicking around longer. (You DID buy the silver/gold alloy phthalocyanine CDs, didn't you?)"

Comments

Tape Drives

[nilstar]

Well - if you recall tape drives were the "big thing" in backup about 5-10 years ago. I have looked at 10 year old tape backups & they work just fine. Maybe we need to trust good old reliable tapes. Or the other (faster) solution would be external hard drive backups.

Re:but something is missing...

[kryptkpr]

I've always wondered if this is actually true or not.. I have yet to see any actual evidence to back up this claim.

It doesn't really matter how fast the reading laser moves along the media, so why would it matter how fast the recording laser moves?

Unanswered Questions

[DarkZero]

What speed was used to write the CDs?
Were they all stored in the same place?
Were they all burned by the same CD burner?
Were they all burned from the same source (a single CD, hard drive, network, etc.)?

30 CDs sounds like an epidemic, but since they were all burned at the same time twenty months ago, there could be a lot of other reasons why all of these discs would go bad. If they were all burned at the same time, then they're effectively talking about one batch, regardless of how many different CD-R brands were used in that single batch.

Does the Dutch article cover this or is this just a scare story?

Standards

[Detritus]

What we need are national or international standards for durability and longevity. Then a manufacturer could have their product tested, and if it passed, put a "Meets ISO Standard XYZ" on the packaging.

I have some Kodak Gold CD-Rs stashed away for archival masters. I have no idea how long the DVD+Rs and DVD+RWs will last.