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Best CD or DVD Recordable Media for Longevity?
icepick72 asks: "I have recently purchased a collection of music (on CDs) for a music group that had their final tour last month. Without getting into copyright issues (I'm writing from Canada -- not that it necessarily makes a difference) I would like to know if any CD-R media on the market supports longevity. In the past Slashdot has discussed the degradation of CD/DVD media. How do I go about knowing what the good media is nowadays, and how to get a decent price on it? One company uses this foil or that foil while another uses polywatchmacallit. Looking for good suggestions, and an archived discussion on Slashdot for future reference."
Well, you could rip it to your favorite format and throw it in a spare hard drive with an external hard drive USB (or firewire) box. This should be able to hold even .WAV files (unless they released over 200 albums).
When USB begins to be phased out for something faster, simply buy whatever the newest hard drive and interface flavor-of-the-month is, and copy from the old HD to the new.
If you are really paranoid, you can just get two drives, and keep them in separate places (preferably separated by 1000 miles or more).
And if you add to that CD-R backups, then you should be prepared for anything.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Verbatim is awesome stuff......they have a limited lifetime warranty! I have never had problems with bad discs. They are sometimes more expensive, but well worth it.
Just search for "archival gold" media. A few companies make it. Most of the degradation comes from the aluminum reflective layer oxidizing, and using a gold layer prevents that. Simple, effective, and not that much more expensive.
Personally, I prefer magneto-optical for the important stuff. Disappearance of the SCSI interface will make the drives unusable long before the media degrades.
TDK CD-R media had a 100 year guarantee printed right on the package. I can't tell you if it was BS or not but TDK seems to take their work seriously. No rebranding, new R&D (that scratchproof coating) and pride in their work. They even have a CD-R for long term digital photo storage. I can't tell you if it is really anything special or just marketing BS, but take a look.
Any how the biggest killers are UV, heat and moisture. Stop those 3 and you should be making the most of any brand. Mabey inside a pelican case w/ desicant inside a bank safe deposite box? Ehhhh overkill, I know.
You use something like - it basically splits your data into blocks and then you can define the amount of redundancy you like.
So say you have a file and running it through par2 with 50% redundancy gives you 100 blocks. All you need at a later date is 50 (any 50) of those blocks and you can recreate the file.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Well, there's what banks do with their optical media, which is have the glass master stored in a safe deposit box. A glass master for a DVD costs about $1000 , CD costs about $700. (Googled from http://www.cddvdking.com/ ).
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Barring that, you can buy TDK professional media ( http://www.tdk.com/professional/ )
Also, googling for Archival CDR reveals a review on the subject by photo.net at http://www.photo.net/mjohnston/column53/, which leads to the $3-a-disk Archival stuff here. http://store.mam-a-store.com/standard---archive-g
Hope this helps.
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I have quite a lot of data (>800GB and growing) I want to keep for at least twenty years, on a budget. Currently, I am using DVD-R.
.PAR2 files, is created by QuickPAR and other tools. Basically, with parity data, if some of your actual data becomes corrupt, you can recover it. I usually create 5% parity data, which means that if 5% of my data becomes corrupt I can still recover it. If 6% becomes corrupt, I'm stuffed. So, for very important stuff, I use 10% or even 25% parity data. Remember to burn the parity data to a different disc, preferably stored in a different place to the disc with the actual data on it.
I only use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs, with a Pioneer 108 DVD-RW drive. Taiyo Yuden invented the original CD-R, and are the only company that still makes discs in Japan. Their discs have excellent quality dye, and provide good quality burns.
When determining how to burn discs, some experimentation is needed. Try different speeds. I have found that a 12x burn gives better quality (i.e. fewer errors, no burn is perfect) than 8x on Taiyo Yuden 8x discs with my burner, but other drives may be different. Try using tools like Nero CD-DVD Speed and DVDInfo to check the number of errors, and that your drive can read the discs at maximum speed all the way to the end. Take a look at the CD Freaks forums, particularly the media tests sub-forum for more info: http://club.cdfreaks.com/
I always create parity data. Parity data, in the form of
A note about PAR2 files and DVDs. If your DVD becomes unreadable, i.e. you can't see the filesystem, rip it as an ISO image file. Use a tool that can skip errors, like ISOBuster. Then, use the PAR2 files to try and recover data from it. PAR2 is clever enough to find useful data blocks inside the ISO.
Don't use anything silly like multi-session discs, and make sure your PC can keep up with your burner so that you don't need to rely on "just-link" or whatever they call it. Make sure you verify data after burning (Nero can do this automatically).
Store the discs in a cool, dry place. If you are on a budget, metal "flight case" boxes with CD wallet style holders are a good bet if you keep them in a cupboard out of the light. Don't use flexible wallets. If you have the money, there are commercial storage systems designed for very old books which would probably work well.
Also, be sure to check discs every few years. I generally test a sample of my discs once a year. If any of them show signs of degrading, such as no longer being able to read at maximum speed or high error rates, I re-copy them. My oldest Taiyo Yuden discs are now four and a half years old, and only one (which I may have mishandled) has started to fail so far.
If you are really paranoid, you could keep the parity data on magnetic tape or hard disc. The advantage of only keeping parity data on these more expensive mediums is that it's usually only 5-10% the size of the actual data, which keeps costs down.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Verbatim's DataLifePlus brand /usually/ means that the disc is rated for a 100 year shelf life with a scratch resistant plastic. Also note that their DVD brand will have an even greater life span due to the fact that the film on a DVD disc is sandwhiched between two layers of plastic. On a CD, the film is exposed to the air.
The discs are also inexpensive. You can pick them up from places like Provantage for under 75 cents each in spindles.