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.

Use Metal, not organic-dye, IOW, use DVD/CD-RW

[NOPteron]

Use RE-Writables, not WORM.

RW discs:
*blanking aneals metal-layer in disc
*burning quick-melts spots of metal in disc, so they freeze quickly to different crystallization than the annealed "normal"
*reading means reading the changes in reflectivity that occur ( or differences in polarization, in magneto-optical, IIRC ) in the METAL reflecting the laser-beam.

Write Once discs:
*new disc is "blank"
*laser "burns" organic-dye in writing,
*reading-laser "sees" the diff between burnt and non-burnt as less-transparent vs more-transparent, and the reflective-layer behind-it means that this is usable binary encoding. . . ( beam goes through organic-dye twice and then is read, or perhaps gets-eaten by the burnt dye and then its absence is read. . . )
*organic-dye decays

IF you care about archival, you then store complete versions of your files,
with checksums and ECC on RW discs.

IF you are using organic-dye write-once discs, then you are basing your ability-to-recover your stuff based on Estimates & Marketing Claims(tm). ..

Cheerses

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.