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."

Comments

External hard drives

[harrkev]

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.

What banks do...

[Hobart]

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/ ).

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-go ld.html

Hope this helps.