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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."
You just can't spend 30p or whatever on a piece of mass produced plastic and expect it to last more than a year or so. It's just not going to happen. DVDs are the worst - I've written slowly to write-once DVDs and not been able to read it back immediately after, or maybe it'll work for a few months then stop - it has very few scratches and I treat it really carefully but still a few files don't work. I'd stick with hard disks.
The NIST site that hosts the article you mentioned has some tips on specific media types, but trying to buy them in small retail quantities isn't alway easy. There's rarely any guarantee that on opening two identically packaged boxes from a media company you'll end up with identical media.
For some anecdotal info (and links to even more anecdotal info), check out the section 7 of the CD-Recordable FAQ
http://www.cdrfaq.org/
To add one more statistically questionable story to the pile, I know several recording studio techs who swear by Mitsui. They're a little more expensive than generics, but you can buy 50 or 100 disc pack from the company itself (or an official distributor) and be reasonably sure of what you're getting. I've had only good experiences with them myself.
But then I've had very few bad experiences so far with any media, and all of those have involved generics with gummy printable labels applied to them, and all were given to me by other people. (My own paranoid technique is to label disks only with a non-alcohol based felt tipped pen.)
On the other hand, if you're goal is archiving the irreplaceable (rather than just stuff that will be expensive to replace), it's hard to beat a pair of hard drives which contain flac (or, if disk space is cheaper than processor time wav) files and checksums for every file. Every year or two you plug in each drive and make sure all the files are good, and when it starts to become hard to find systems that will interface with your old drives, you transfer everything to new ones. When you can pick up a 200 gig ata drive and a USB hard drive enclosure for well under a hundred bucks, it's hard to argue against that sort of strategy. You could do the same with DVDs or even CDs, of course, but checking them becomes a manual hassle.
In any event, make two copies of everything so that if one goes bad, you are likely to have a backup. Keeping one somewhere other than your house doesn't hurt either.