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Burned CDs Last 5 years Max -- Use Tape?
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld has interviewed Kurt Gerecke, an IBM storage expert and physicist who claims burned CDs only have a two to five-year lifespan, depending on the quality of the CD. From the article: "The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data 'shifting' on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam." Gerecke recommends magnetic tapes to store pictures, videos and songs."
Use gold discs ... they last longer ... museums even use this.
what about DVDs?
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I have some CDs that are burned copies (although I'd call this great quality cds, not cheap storebrand with no backing), stored in a CD wallet case that are easily over 5 years old... still work great.
Starmen.net
Magnetic tape? Ok
Anyone know where I can download an MP3 jukebox for my Vic 20?
Haven't other studies confirmed much longer lifetimes in the past for CD-R? After all, we've had CD burners for longer than 2-5 years. Is this only a surprise because absolutely nobody has ever gone back and tried to read an old disc? Somehow I'm still doubtful of his conclusions.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have CDs that have lasted 10 years with no errors. Obviously 5 years is not the maximum life. Perhaps the maximum EXPECTED life.
I'm sure I won't be the first to say that I have been burning CDs for more than 5 years, and have basically never had one fail. This "Scientific Research" doesn't really pass the bullshit test.
I have a couple of CDs (Ricoh brand) that I burned in 1997 that still work fine. I have a few I burned last year that are dead already.
12:50 - press return.
I have data CDs burned in 1995. They still read just fine. I have audio CDs burned in 1998. They, too, work fine.
This is bogus. Who writes this tripe?
We've known that CD-Rs will degrade for a long time. Hispace have recently launched a new range of CD-Rs aimed at digital photographers. These disks use 24 caret gold to help add stability to the disks. As a result, they come with a 100 year warranty.
Your porn will be around for decades after all!!
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Anyone who uses anything but real backup media for backup deserves to loose his data.
CDs and DVDs are not for backup. Yes, you can use them to transfer data, or even for short term storage (6 months or less).
HD is also not a good media for backup. If you keep it running, it will break down soon. If you don't, it will also break down, since it doesn't live long without some spinups.
Flash (and other solid state media) also will loose its content in a short time if not refreshed.
We really don't have many options besides tapes. And even tapes are still a problem, since the tape using tend to break down, and you can't find units around for old media (tried to buy a hexabyte unit lately ?).
All in all, tape is the way to go, but make sure you have backups for your tape drives too. Make sure you have humidity and temp control.
morcego
The wedding photographer for my wedding gave me a DVD of the video + photos. After about two years the DVDs were so degraded that I could not a single DVD player would recognize them. And that's with light usage... Now I keep important DVD as images on an external hard disk.
I've known about this for years...that's why I store all my important data exclusively on punch cards. Nothing will degrade my precious bales and bales of punch cards! My data will outlast the Apocalypse!
See, look at all these wonderful punched cards....they'll last fore...waitaminit...where did all these silverfish come from???
NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tapes will degrade as well (think cassette tapes). While CDs may not last forever, they certainly are much easier to use and more prevalent than tape backup systems (I'm not saying they're better). The world will not switch to tape systems. Besides CDs can last as long as tapes if you store them in a cool (not cold), dark place. If your data is so important, then you should be careful with your backups and certainly won't rely on CDs; you'll have HDD backups, CD, flash, and whatever else you can get your hands on.
I have dozens of cd-r's that are more than 10 years old and they all work!
The truth or interpretation..
When I first asked this question of how long CDs will last, I was told about 70 years.
I was also told that to lengthen a CDs shelf life, always store them vertically in a cool dry place, and clean them from the inside ring to the outer edge in a straight line.
I found an article from the Optical Storage Technology Association and they say it depends on the initial CD quality and handling.
According to this article, unrecorded CDRs last about 5-10 years, manufacturers claim recorded CDRs 50-200 years and recorded CDRWs 20-100 years.
More info: http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa13.htm
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...we use these things, they last longer than 5 years.
Poke your head out of academia/the research lab once every decade.
I just checked some 8-9 year old CD-R disks, and they are reading fine, no read errors. I store them in a metal drawer (dark, cool). Does IBM still make tapes and drives?
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Somewhere I've read that, depending on the quality of the blank CD media you're using and how you're storing it, expected lifespans can be as low as two (2) years.
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My understanding is that magnetic systems like tape and HD slowly de-magnify over a long enough period. Is there any other digital storage mechanism that doesn't degrade in optimal storage conditions over long enough time frames (ie 100 years plus)?
I have no idea if I'll ever have anything worth keeping for that long, but I'd like to be able to do it if the need arises. And there's always pr0n backups to think of.
I find this very interesting, considering that for a long time Verbatim CD that I bought actually listed the AZO technology (or whatever the listed) as being so good that it guaranteed the integrity of the disc for over 50 years.
I've always used Verbatim CD, and all my old data still works fine. The only bad burns I ever had were because my first generation burner would choke if I tried to multi-task at all.
Just my 2 cents, anyone else remember that Verbatim technology?
I wonder if that engineer is watching his stock in the magnetic tape manufacturers to see if it goes up.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
I can't remember all of the details, but I am sure there was a Dutch group who took a sample of all of the available CDs at the time, burnt data onto them, put them in storage for 2 years and then re-tested the disks quality. Their results showed that all of the disks had significant degredation.
.. here is a link to a news report of that study
OK
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7751 This link includes a link to the original Dutch article
To quote:
"The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers."
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Last year (2004) I went back and copied all my CDs over to DVD, dating back to 1999 (well, oldest one still of any value). This was 100+ CDs, all stored in a standard CD wallet, treated nicely and kept in normal room conditions. None were unreadable, in fact the 1999 TDKs were all read at max speed. The noname CDs I bought in later years spun up and down and up and down but finally read all data as well. With some clean-up it didn't end up as more than about a dozen DVDs. On the other hand, you can destroy a disc that has no protection layer in seconds by e.g. dropping your keys on them, friend of mine did and the layer came right off. But they won't die from degradation alone.
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The best way to preserve data, imho is storage independent. Suppose you want to archive your family photos. Sure you can put them on a hard drive... then you can use raid, hard drive will be replaced regulary and the probability of a simultaneous failure being low you dramatically increase the lifespan of your storage. The same could be done on the internet with a P2P network dedicated to long term storage. You divide your files into chuncks and calculate a hash. Peers download it and keep it on their machines. You just have to keep signatures of your chuncks, you can do that on highly reliable mediums, like grave it into stone if you wish. The P2P network automatically polls for chunks and ensure redundancy by pushing rare pieces to clients. To ensure collaboration, you can upload only a fraction of what you host. Some sort of bittorrent expect it's rather a bitpool.
\u262D = \u5350
Gerecke recommends magnetic tapes to store pictures, videos and songs.
Because, as anyone who's ever dealt with a cassette tape or a floppy disk knows, magnetic media never goes bad...
-JDF
...just because they claim to have invented magtape and have a big stake in the market.
I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things).
The reasons for this:
1. depressingly high failure rate of hard disks
2. lack of long term storage media
3. obsolete formats
As for tape, DLTtape (invented for the venerable VAX) is supposed to be able to last 25 years in good condition. How many people buy DLTtape drives? They aren't cheap and the tapes are not cheap. They are about the only thing with the capacity to store all your photos and video on one cartridge.
Digital photos and video seem like great things (and are: I'd hate to have to edit my videos the old fashioned way) but there is a sting in the tail that most people won't expect. If I want to look at a photograph my Dad took in 1972, I just pull it out the draw and look at it. No maintenance has had to be done on that photograph - it's just been stored in a cool, dry, dark place.
Digital data on the other hand needs periodic maintenance. If a format you've used becomes obsolete, you have to go through and update your entire library. You have to periodically back it up. You have to periodically cut it to media like CD. How much family history have people lost already due to dead hard disks, and not realising the need to continuously back up and format shift? Even if a DLTtape cartridge is still intact and readable in 75 years time, will there be anything to read it? Will JPEG decoders come with everyone's device to view photos?
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Not only have the early deaths of CD-Rs been greatly exaggerated before, but even the lifespan of pressed CDs were (are?) hotly disputed. In the early 80's I heard all about how CDs would last forever because each play didn't degrade the quality ever so slightly like it did with cassette tapes and vinyl records. Then in the late 80's a group of researchers determined that CDs would probably only last ten years, for whatever reason.
I got my first CD-RW drive when it was a $700 2x model well over ten years ago. The first things I burned were a bootleg Tragically Hip CD and a few rented Playstation games. I still play that Hip CD and recently I dugg out my Playstation collection to use with the epsxe emulator and they all still work great, though I can't remember which of my burned games were copied when.
I have had a few CDs and DVDs go bad, but they've always been really cheap media. Even cheap CD-Rs have been ok, but I have noticed that cheap DVD-Rs can be very poor quality and sometimes the data won't last through the night. These are usually identifiable because at least half the time the data will be corrupt straight out of the burner. You don't have to spend a lot to get good media, just don't get the cheapest media you can find.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Someone has stock in a magnetic media company. I have some way old CDs that are just fine.
--------------
David O.
permenant storage?n s/blank-media.html
http://www.matrixsemi.com/products-and-applicatio
How many people find they need data after 6 months? Even with businesses, it seems that most of my customers (a lot of engineers and high-rise building contractors) seem to prefer paper form over digital, for archival purposes.
For data I really NEED for more than 6 months, I find off-site archival the best solution. First, that's their job. Second, they're cheap and they expand my data storage size as needed. Third, they're insured.
If someone tells me they "need" to save something forever, I point them to the off-site companies. All my customers are running a minimum of T1 in bandwidth. Most are much faster. If I have 10Mbps at home, businesses will be close behind. I've had hard drives that couldn't write that fast (kidding, but close) in the old days.
I don't see the need to worry about storage and environment and all that -- just subcontract it out. You do what you're good at, let others do what they're good at.
I have several CD-ROMs that I created over 10 years ago using Kodak Ultima CD-Rs and I can still read them in my PC and Mac. The Ultimas were the best CD-Rs, IMHO, that were ever made. It's a shame that Kodak no longer produces this high-quality line of CD-Rs. I certainly would willingly pay a premium price for these if I could find them or CD-Rs of the same quality.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Seems that with all the recent cost cutting CD-R manufacturers have been using cheaper materials lately. I have CD-Rs that are like 10 years old and still running strong. However, I have some CD-Rs that I have purchased within the last few months and they are already going bad.
http://www.tradealyst.com/
Just wondering what effect burn speed has on the whole thing. I mean, there are obviously a lot of people here talking about how their CDs burned in 95-98 still work fine. Burn speeds at the time were limited to 2x-4x. Meanwhile, there are lots of stories about CDs burned in the last few years that have failed. These are generally burned at 24-40x. Any chance that it's not so much a factor of the media (though it will obviously play some role), but more a factor of the burn speed?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I think businesses here and there are starting to realize that the digital era creates a ton of data that needs archiving.
People continue to buy music, take pictures, capture videos, buy music etc.. but less and less of it comes on a physical support.
People tend to "rat pack" everything on their computers. The problem is computers are inherently unsecure and reliable. Even top geeks tend to forget to back up their material.
Today we learn that indeed a DVD-R or CD-R is no good.
I have already started uploading my most precious data (pictures) to Flickr with a pro $25/year account. Unlimited storage and Flickr backup can retrieve everything for you if you need.
In the next 5-10years I predict many tears as people's computers get wiped out by viruses, get stolen or simply break-down.
Why can't a business offer unlimited storage with limited bandwith (i.e. 2gb/month)?
This is the only way digital media will survive throught the ages.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
When I was in High School, in 1993, a friend of mines, brother burned me a copy of the Journman Project Mac CD-Rom Game on a CD burner at work. I think I paid $15 for the blank media, but I had a burned CD.
Last time I checked, that disk was still readable. It has been in box ever since.
this of course if only one case, but thought I would mention it
Andrew
They were burned at 2x via an iomagic 2x burner that cost 300 at the time. However I do have CD's with no names that are much younger and haven't lasted. They also just happen to be audio CD's. Any idea on DVD+r's? I'm just getting into burning the family vids on them how long can I expect them to last. I'm planning on keeping ISO images on an offline drive for backup.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I just recently tested ~120 cds from about 1999-2002.
Attempting to read them with a DVD drive failed many discs.
But reading with a CD drive I was able to read all of them (after some cleaning) except two (most files were readable) that were scratched.
It seem there is some difference between DVD and CD drives.
Most CDs were burned with 2-8x speed, I almost never use >16x today.
Tape is a pain in the ass. Just make copies of your discs every few years, or whenever the technology changes (CDR to DVDR, DVDR to HDVDR, HDVDR to the holographic crystals from Superman, etc)
Have you ever read that the maximum life of a hard drive is 5 years or the maximum life of a processor is 10 years?
I might be temped to believe it if I haven't seen 20 year old computers running fine.
The concern I have is whether I had a working drive to read the tapes with in 40 years.. Oh, nevermind, I'm 60 now, so that probably won't be a problem for me personally..
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
For most personal users one DVD will fit everything they need. If they have a big photo collection maybe re-burn all DVDs yearly.
I used to backup to CDROM. Now I back up to DVD. I'm sure something else will come out in the future.
People keep referring to their 10 year old CDs that still work just fine, but with the exremely competitive blank disc market, manufacturers are constantly looking to cut costs. As a result, the quality has been steadily declining. But that's ok. I would expect that 80% or more of all CDs burned today will have been thrown away 3 or 4 years from now. Most CDs are not burned for long-term backup.
If you really want long-term backup solutions, buy the true archival quality discs. You wont find them on the shelf at Best Buy for obvious reasons, but they are easily available if you go looking for them.
Print out everything vital on acid-free archival-grade paper. Store it in a cool dry place. Lasts for centuries...
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Isn't the cost point close enough yet to just use hard drives instead for long term storage and not be too bad?
You can pick up OEM 250GB hard drives for around $100. Toss in a $50 USB case or a SATA case and you're looking at $1.67 a GB storage. Plus you're not limited to 4.5GB file size.
Sure drives fail but you won't be spinning them that often. I'm begining to think it may be worth it for the long term. Then use the USB drive or SATA as needed and if need be burn a disk.
My brother stored 100+ movies on cd's a few years ago (2-3 years), and lots of them are unreadable now. At that time we did not think it would harm anything to use those, but storing the cd's on his sleeping room with hot temperatures during the summers and the nights, but cold during winter (and when he opens his room to ventilate) completely ruins them.
Nowadays with so many pc's coming and going we have enough hard drive space to keep data there. We only need to make sure we buy new drives from time to time to keep them very alive...
Dependency hell? =>
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I call bullshit. I have about 10 spindles of 50 discs in my basement that are all > 5 years old, some are approaching 10.
I recently ran every disc in the oldest spindle through Nero CD Speed, which detects errors even if they are corrected. I found no more errors than I did in a similar sample of discs burned in the last month.
Tape is no good either; there are warehouses full of them rotting faster than they can be read, as we speak.
Much to the shagrin of CM everywhere... I guess it comes back to replication as the best way to store data. But just to check... I pulled out a 3.5" floppy I had written my first major program in 1985 (QuickBasic - Numerical Analysis Spline Function - Complete with graphics!). It still reads just fine. The problem was finding a drive to read it in. Now if I can only load up those old QuickBasic floppies (5.25") and run it...
Just like any other medium, how long the disks last depend in part on how you treat them. I have a stacks and stacks of data CDs that are still fine after several years, but I make sure to take care of them. For important data, I make at least two copies of the CD/DVD to make sure that we don't have a single point of failure. I also jot down the date that I burned the CD. Periodically, we'll pull out the CDs and try to read them. We don't do this with all of them, only the CDs that haven't been used for a couple years. Every once in a rare while you'll find a bad one -- just copy the good one over to a new CD, jot down the date and put them back. This might seem a little obsessive complusive to some of you, but trust me, it doesn't hurt to be extra cautious especially with really important data that may be called on years in the future and it really doesn't take that much effort.
NIST Did a study that shows up to 30+ years of longevity that is totally dependant on handling and storage.
What is that difference between theory and reality? In theory, there is no difference.
'nuff said.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You laugh but I bet IBM's Millipede would outlast present technology (including tape).
Historically, the best way to make sure that your data will really last, is to start a religion devoted to studying, copying, distributing, and preserving it.
The trick is to sort out the transcription errors after a couple millenia.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I have a bunch of Windows machines sold with no media, only a recovery CD proc and some blanks. I'm sure the state of these recovery CDs is questionable. Another year or two they'll be bad and when something goes wrong they won't be usable. I've already experienced this with a backup Windows 2000 installation CD.
So.....what you need to do is re burn all your burned CD's every 1-2 years.
Great. I lose hundreds of precious photos. They give me a buck.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Finally, some have claimed that the glue on the sticky labels might affect the longevity of the dye in the disc, presumably by leaching through the thin top coating of polymer. Search for "glue" in that story, it's half way down or so.
Good thing I still have my trust 2GB native Wang DAT. Man.... so old and yet so reliable.
What maybe buying the crappy CDRs, or leaving the good ones out in the sun for too long, but 5 years "MAX" definately isn't right. I just keep buying more hard drives and setting them up in a RAID configuration. That way those family reunion photos are always up and ready to be viewed. Now that's inefficiency at its finest.
Choose no moving parts.
Choose not having an easily damaged surface.
Choose data that doesn't fade.
Choose timeless hardware interfacing.
Choose near immortality for you data.
Choose PROM.
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Anyone have 20 yr old regular CDs. How do you like your constellation. Regular CD's dont last forever, why should recordable.
My 5-year-old DVDs play just fine still, but if this is true, then the MPAA ought to be forced to allow legal copies so we may preserve films we legally purchased from them by copying them to new media every 4 years. I don't recall any warnings on any of the DVDs I purchased about shelf life--neither from the MPAA, the distributor, or the manufacturer of DVD recorders.
The MPAA and manufacturers have a lot of explaining to do:
On top of it, this begs the question of whether there is any longevity improvement for the new DVD formats. Are the new formats going to have any better shelf life--because with those data densities, even more data will be at risk.
How about copying the data off of the old CDs to new CDs, or to whatever new format is avaliable (hd-dvd/blue ray). Even if CDs last forever, the drives that read them will eventually stop being manufactured... Wasn't this the exact problem that a big corporation/government had with old tape archives?
From a story three years back on National Public Radio:
"The whole history of recorded sound has been a case of one technology leapfrogging over a previous one," Karr says. "But in the last few decades, the changes from vinyl to tape cassette to CD to MP3 have shortened the life span of most music collections."
But thanks to a grant from the Smolian-Giovannoni Foundation, all of these audio formats are being transferred onto 10-inch wide, 78 rpm shellac disks -- the one rock-solid format archivists have identified that works every time.
See complete article at Shellac, the Sound of the Future
does this mean the 8-track will make a comeback? Imagine how many mp3's you could store on those! Whoopie!
Most serious photographers I know re-burn their archives every one or two years.
Check it: http://mam-a.com/products/gold/archive.html
They claim "storage life in excess of 300 years".
Granted, claims like that are easy to make. . . Still, there's a huge difference between 5 years and 300 years. Who is closer to being right?
My floppy only holds 1.44 megs of information. Zip disks have the COD (Click of Death) and only hold 100 megs on average. The last tape drive cost he $300 and the tapes only lasted 2 years before they died. So where are the sub $200 magnetic media (a price to put it on par with CD and DVD burners) that has a comparable life span and read speed as my optical media?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
This guy is using the wrong hole for speech. Quick someone tell him before he makes a total tit of himself. Whoops too late.
I have plenty of burnt CR-Rs that are way over 2 years old and going strong. I admit most of them are in boxes in a cupboard but I've yet to find one that has failed.
As an example of how tough burnt cds are I am sort of running an experiment. We held a christmas party in 2003 and I wanted some music to play on the DVD so I grabbed a
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
If they had been recorded on CD-R in 1978, they'd probably be gone now.
Nope. If CD-R technology would have existed in 1978, then the burner would've been a HUGE desk-sized piece of equipment that used a powerful laser to actually burn tiny holes into a thin aluminum disk embedded into a piece of glass. That kind of burned optical digital storage disk would likely last for several decades unless the glass gets broken.
If the stability of the dye is the problem, then storing at lower temperatures will almost certainly slow the degradation.
Freezing probably wouldn't work though, I'm guessing that the disk could be damagerd due to water trapper inside the disk manufacture or water which is part of the dye formulation. It would be fairly simple to test.
Preserve your TVs and add thermal mass to your refrigerator at the same time !
Absolute statements are never true
microwaving them to seal in that delicious data goodness.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I have always viewed any burnable optical disc as a short-term disposable item - I never seriously considered them as a safe medium for long-term archival storage. Up to the recent past, I would have agreeed with the recommendation that magnetic tape is a better long-term medium....but then I ran into the problem of trying to make an ancient tape drive work. These days, I use good old-fashioned IDE (PATA) hard drives in external IDE-to-USB2/FireWire enclosures for archival storage. The problem of the bearings wearing out doesn't happen if the drive isn't on. As long as it's stored in appropriate environmental conditions - it'll last > 100 years. I have a couple of them that I rotate offsite every two weeks, so one copy is at home and another is at the office. Simple, cheap and very reliable.
... I like to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out. - Judge Harry Stone, Night Court
My first burned CD was from 1998 and it still passes CD check tests ive done on it. It was one of those deep dark blue verbatim datalifeplus 4X cd-rs. I cant find ones like that anymore so I always make 2 or 3 copies of a cd if its something important (backups) for redundancy.
The only problems ive ever had with data loss was when burning multiple multisessions (like 10+ sessions), it would start going crazy and files wouldn't be accessable and stuff. But if i manually extacted each session and burnt them to new cds all the data was there, so nothing was lost it was just whatever keeps track of the files for each session was screwed up.
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If you need to frequently access data from a removable device or you need to share it with computers (some of which you don't control), tape is bad because it is slow & not on all machines & less portable. A CD-R, DVD+/-R, or USB stick are great options.
They aren't great backup devices, though. You should keep additional backups of any content on these, just as you do with your hard drive.
As far as backup goes, tape is the king. Even small workgroups should consider implementing an automated tape backup server. There is some up-front cost, but it saves A LOT of head aches down the road.
This up-front costs keeps it out of many home users setups. Used or low capacity equipment can be cheap, but the least expensive options (such as AMANDA w/ a single cartridge firewire drive) still take an enthusiast to setup.
Optical media is often "good enough" for home users: it usually isn't the end of the world to lose a disc of MP3s. But making copies of the discs & periodically verifying the integrity of important discs would be prudent.
That's a well known idea, I was going to put here some samples of the distributed backup in action but only can find when Cringely talked about the very same concept.
--
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But really, regardless which technology you use are you sure you'll still be able to easily read the
media 5,10,15 years from now? The bottom line I think, is if the data is valuable, then back it up and
re-back it up using whichever modern media format is available at the time. What good is the media if you can't find a device to read it?
The article says to use magnetic tape because the CDs degrade.
So does tape. Unless you're the BOfH, in which case you have a tape safe. But you can't use that to store tapes - its not climate controlled, and you've got too many bodies hidden in it anyway ... but ever tried to read a 10-year-od tape on a new machine? I gave up - it was easier to connect to a serial port and just dump the whole database over the course of a week, its that bad. Then another day for updates. Todays USB and Firewire will be the next generation's serial ports.
So, use a hard drive?
Leave it sitting on a shelf too long and you get "stiction" - so that's no good either. And have you even TRIED to access a 10-year-old drive in todays machines? The bois tries to auto-config, and the machine won't boot.
Zip disks? Hahahah click of death hahahah (I've got several zip drives that are "unzipped")
Paper printouts? Well, those are good for a few decades, but not exactly portable ... anyone care to figure out how many acres of trees a hex dump of a 200-gig drive will take?
Nope, stone tablets - to hit anyone over the head with who thinks that there's any real long-term solution other than to just re-copy to the latest format and pray.
The article and comments seem to center around the length of life of CDRs. The real story, I think, is the claim that magnetic tape is the way to go for archival purposes. This Kurt Gerecke must be a theorist or fundamental researcher because anyone (like me) who as actually had to retrieve something off of archived magnetic tape will tell you what bullshit this is.
I'm lucky to get 5 minutes out of the memorex cd-r media i purchased at target. junk.
Are my favourite storage medium. Look how long that recording of 'Caveman IV - The Return of the Mamoth' lasted.
My Portfolio
Magnetic tape degrades, too. Plastic tape (e.g. VHS, cheap audio tapes, mini-DV) starts to have visible degradation after 5 years under optimal conditions. Metal tape (e.g. Betacam) takes up to ten years, IIRC, at optimal storage temperature, humidity, etc. Also, the thinner the tape (in both thickness and width), the more quickly it will degrade... It can take less than a year with mini-DV tapes.
Also, although consumer video and audio tape have remained in the same (poor-quality) tape format for some years now, professional formats are constantly changing. CDs and DVDs have been being used for backups for some time now because they still play back on 90% of computers with cheap (less than $100) drives. The tape format, especially for video, can vary from production to production -- Betacam SP, Digi-Beta, Mini-DV for smaller productions, etc. Finding a deck that will play back these tapes 5-10 years from now will be a challenge, even if the tape is in perfect condition. And a Betacam SP deck, which is now all but obselete, still goes for $5000+ USD.
Any good sysadmin knows you would never rely on the "lifespan" of the media to save you.
I have my crucial data on the computer hard drive (of course), and backed-up to three seperate external hard drives. One drive may indeed fail when I need it, but three is not likely. Ans since I could buy nearly a TB of external storage (each drive is 250-400GB) for less than $1000, it was really a no-brainer.
Don't forget that tape are by no means indestructable. I had an assistant one time who brought their cheap-ass, non-magnetically sheilded walkman speakers to the server room, and spent the day rocking out. Problem was, their workstation was next to the tape library. Three of the tapes in the media set were corrupted by the magnets in the speakers, and had to be re-created.
If he hadn't fessed up and told me what happened, I would not have realized it until I needed to restore the data.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
It's new again!
Or maybe we filed this info on one of those CDs a few years back...
Unless you restore it once in a while to be sure, you are flying without a net.
I've had multiple cases where the disk crashed, and the company found out the tapes would not restore.
After one incident, I finally got the company to spring for 7 sets of tapes (maybe $1500). 7 daily rotating backups. We also bought a new set of tapes each month and kept that monthly backup forever. We also restored one or two files from the tape the day after backup to confirm it really was a good backup.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
how many music collections comprised of CD-R's will be going. Whether they're backups of their own or burned copies of other's CDs, some people's music collections are going to start shrinking...much to the record companies' delight. Not everyone stores music on their computers. Was the limited lifespan of CD-R's a design consideration or a flaw?
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." [Linus B. Torvalds]
They're subject to magnetic drift as well... Longer lifespan, yes, but only measured in years of effective lifespan as thermal variation causes loss of magnetic domains on the media as does all the magnetic fields around and about in our world these days.
It's...difficult...to be making statements about media stability. Mechanical recordings (i.e. Vinyl or Acetate recordings) have an extremely long shelf life compared to most of the other medias- as long as they are properly stored. Unfortunately, until recently, with laser based read heads, to play the media was to degrade it slowly. It's also much more fragile than the CD and bulky- thermal extremes will trash the discs and improper storage will render them unreadable by way of warpage. And, worse, they didn't make 'em for other digital media formats right at the moment.
So, what do you use?
I'd say that you're likely to find that phase change media or Flash storage being the ones that might happen to have the lifespans and data integrity that we're all looking for.
If it were me, I'd use Hard Disks for actively used media that doesn't need portability. For portability, it seems Flash is the way to go- no real apparent risks of degredation over time and it's WAAAY portable. For things that exceed current storage capacities for Flash media, I'd probably use DVD+/-RW media as it's the current best phase-change media format and is liable to be closer to the represented exepected lifespan of the media (>100yrs...). Don't re-write, just burn ONCE to the media. Yes, it's slower and the media is more expensive, but it's higher integrity because of the nature of the media.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Don't buy name brand media. They're just rebranding, and they can switch suppliers on you.
Go right to the asian source, buy from a reputable importer. I use supermediastore.com, and I buy nothing but Taiyo Yuiden media.
The place where I work has a high-speed multispindle CD-R duplication station, and goes through CD-Rs by the thousands per month. I asked a while ago and they have tried everything, and now use NOTHING but Taiyo Yuiden media also. If they have a failure, we have to ship a replacement overnight; so a single disc failure, by the time you count all the people who have to handle a complaint and the postage, can easily cost $50, so they buy what WORKS.
In an ideal world, we'd back up everything to a wide variety of different media, and send duplicates of each to be stored in bunkers on a wide variety of different continents. But in an ideal world, we wouldn't end up dead.
My approach is to back everything up to CD-R, but not to label it. If, after what looks like two years, I haven't used the disk or have forgotten what's on it, I throw it away on the assumption that I'm very unlikely to miss it.
Just use a high powered laser to etch the information 12" deep into granite slabs. Store slabs in a salt dome in Nevada. Should last awhile.
I drank what? -- Socrates
In recent years there has been some development into using your MINI DV camcorder as a backup device. Here's one http://www.tomdownload.com/multimedia_design/video /firestreamer_digital_video.htm. A 60m tape offers about 12GB of storage. No error corrections or validation of the write.
These might get you an extra few years:
v dr_bq.html
http://www.maxellcanada.com/press_releases/2005/d
"DVD-R Broadcast Quality 8x is a high performance disc that provides top performance for a wide range of multimedia applications. The DVD-R Broadcast Quality DVD employs Maxell's new MAXPRO Hardcoat Technology(TM). This new technology provides a hardcoat that is scratch resistant and dust and fingerprint repellent. The DVD-R Broadcast Quality discs have an archival and shelf life that is up to 2 times longer than Standard DVD's and also provide anti-static properties which are 20 times more effective. Maxell's DVD-R Broadcast Quality offers a long archival life, a high rate of compatibility and is backed up by a lifetime warranty."
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
The word on the street is that discs recorded at speeds commensurate with what they will be played back at might be more readable, i.e. recording at 36X is more reliable than recording at 4X.
Granted it wasn't possible to burn discs at 36X in the pre-2000 time frame, but the few I have from that era I still use from time to time and they are fine.
Wish me luck recovering my FORTRAN programming archives on 1/2" tape. I'd have had better luck translating the files into 300 baud audio files and transcribing them onto vinyl LPs.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I'm confused about this "tape". Can someone explain? Got to go, my watch says I need gas in my car.
I don't know about anyone else, but I find myself tripping over old hard drives these days. Upgrades are the typical cause of older, lower capacity drives laying around. 18GB isn't much for a system drive these days, but if you think about it, it's really nice for an MP3 collection or even a few DVD movies.
Best answer? Label those drives and put'm on a shelf and call THAT long-term storage. If you can somehow use those drives (think USB external enclosure) in the future to reference that data again, it will be relatively fast and not require specific backup software or anything like that.
Tapes? Tape drives? Someone is trying to sell a stock of old drives, I'll bet. My $1,300 Seagate tape drive and expensive tapes were very unreliable compared to CDs and DVDs.
CDs and DVDs stored in ziplock bags seem to last a long time.
Changes in atmosperic pressure cause other methods of storage to breathe. Eventually pollution enters. Ziplock bags don't breathe, they just expand and contract as the weather changes.
If you continuously backup all of your data to other hard disks, always replacing your running disks before they get too old, then you never have these problems. So, who cares about tapes v. CDs?!
Besides, when I hear someone complaining about the shelf-life of CDs and advocating the use of tapes instead -- especially for backup purposes -- I begin to suspect that they're actually speaking on behalf of the tape industry. Anyway, tapes just remind me of nasty stuff like ARCserve, which makes me want to throw up.
I think the range is larger than 2-5 years. I picked up a spindle of cheap ($.20/disc) blanks to copy CD's onto for the car knowing they will get scratched up and none of them lasted even a year (even the ones that didn't bake in the Texas sun failed within a year). I have some CD's I burned in '97 from some HP disc's marketed for long term storage and to date not a single one of these have failed. Personally for my photography I shoot both film and digital. I have prints and negatives from 25 years ago that are still good though a little faded. You can't beat the convenience of shooting digital but I hate to have so many images at risk. I want to be sure at least some of the pictures I take of my daughter will be around decades from now. My problem with the suggestion of using magnetic tape is that magnetic tape isn't a sure thing either; we have lots of backup tapes at work that go bad; especially ones that have been stored for years.
I used to use DLT, but it does not have enough capacity any more. Now I use two extra hard drives for images and sources. One for backups, then every now and then I connect the second backup drive, copy the backups there, disconnect it and keep it offsite. I'm considering using encryption too for home pr0n and other sensitive material.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
That is 1.67 Gb per dollar. You really meant $0.60 per Gb.
Put cost over size to get cost per size, not the other way around.
What if you don't have 10-15 gigabytes of files? DLT tape is long term, but really expensive. CD's from the article above is not long lived. Hard drives are a good solution, but could be daunting for less technically oriented users.
What about flash drives, compact flash, jump drives and such? Anyone have a link to their life cycle? The non-technical user could easily keep a copy of their files updated on the USB drive and put it in a drawer.
--- Darmoth
... probably nothing can beat baked clay tablets buried in sand, or maybe cuneiform similarly embedded in clay balls and lost in the desert. Of course, the access latency *stinks* :-)
Runners-up: Acid-free paper printed with bar codes, properly stored, and maybe parchment.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
I still say the best method for backing data up is a seperate backup server, with disks in raid5. Email notification when a disk goes bad ( to a cell phone ).
In a corporate enviroment, you'd have a pair of these things, rsyncing to each other in different locations.
That way, you can guarantee:
1) Media will be readable in the future
2) Active correction: I fix errors as they occure
3) I always know the status of my backup
I even recommend this for home users. It's more expensive than blank CDs, but it's far more reliable. As paraniod as I am about losing my pictures of my daughter, I know most people are worse.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ask NASA about this issue.
I ended up throwing out a box of backup tapes, made on a MSDOS system, using a tape drive whose controller card was no longer supported with drivers under windows and a backup software package from a company that was no longer in business.
The one advantage of something like CDROM backups is the "hope" that you will have a CDROM drive, installed in a system with a compatible OS, that will be able to read them.
But, will you?
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
I'll still be in prison for pirating movies (along with my grandfather, Robert "Fingers" Malone) by the time my porn collection degrades... I am saddened and dismayed.
I Lost My Virginity While Waiting for BSD to Compile.
Sorry, you just reminded me of the History of Life Part I, where Moses comes out with the Fifteen Commandments... Oops, Ten Commandments...
This thread also strikes me as funny because I'm in the middle of archiving about 800 VHS tapes to DVD. Many are 15-20 years old, and I've been surprised at how well most of them still work. I wonder if the DVDs will last as long, but I figure it'll be easier to move the data off them since it won't have to be done in real time.
Besides, it's more of a space issue at this point. Which I'm guessing would be an issue with the stone tablets too!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Now I know why Office Max litterally GIVES away CD-Rs (w/rebates) - because they suck (the CDs that is)
I use these for music all the time - they last about 3 months - especially if I really like whats on them
The more I play them, the worse they get - they actually start to sound staticy. It kind of sounds like I have a 6 vinyl LP player in my car!
no biggie though - just chuck the disk in the garbage and re-burn
It is amazing how fast you can make them deteriorate though
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
You have to replace all your discs before even the first one fails. The maximum possible life doesn't matter. If your CD can last between 5 and 100 years, you'll be pretty pissed if you assume 10 and find out they all went bad after 6.
punch cards?
It also begs the question; what tape media DO we use to make duplicate 'long term' backs of our existing 300 DVD/CD 'long term' backup stored in the safe, given it needs to last at least 10years? And where do I find the time to do it?
Given the budgets most SME's (like the one I work for) have, I figure most of the technology and the actually man hours involved is out of financial reach, and thus the company is doomed to death by 'failure to comply with freedom of information act'.
Ah well, thank god Friday is my last day here...[humour]woo hoo! someone's else's problem! [/humour]
I've known about this for years...that's why I store all my important data exclusively on punch cards.
You joke about this, but apparently, for a few hundred dollars, one can build an EMP weapon that will destroy all the electronics in a good sized building. And, what's possibly even more disturbing, there is a widespread belief that the detonation of just a single nuclear warhead at an altitude of a few hundred miles could take out most of the electronics in an entire nation [maybe even a continent].
That's one of the reasons that military grade electronics are so expensive [and so heavy]: Typically, they're shielded in lead.
*Fortunately no one has tested that belief in practice. Yet.
As a photographer with a completely digital workflow, this issue is a big nightmare for me. To keep myself from loosing sleep I send the clients a DVD, and I keep a DVD myself, AND I back everything onto TWO external hard drives. If anyone has a reliable and cheap system, I'd love to hear about it.
San Francisco Photographers
That has to be the most pretentious fucking website I have ever seen.
SMALL TEXT NO GRAPHICS LOTS OF RANDOM PARENTHETICAL STATEMENTS USAGE OF FAKE WORDS OMFG I'M SO COOL
"stop. unchain. (chain reaction)"
I only have one thing to say about this. The last line.
+++ATH0
I like to back up all my information on stone tablets. They are the ultimate in information backup. I mean come on, if it's good enough for 5000 year old civilizations, it's good enough for me. Now I just have to figure out where to store them. Does anyone have a huge geometrically shaped tomb that I can bury this under? Oh, and I'll need some traps and curses for file protection as well.
And they still work like a charm.
Most of them are Verbatim and TDK branded, and have blue surface. Green surface ones doesn't lasts as much, forget about golden ones.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
I have CDs that have lasted 10 years with no errors. Obviously 5 years is not the maximum life. Perhaps the maximum EXPECTED life.
First the author is referring to CDR/CDRW discs. Ones that are burned, not stamped. The composition of the two are very different.
Secondly, the major point is, you probably don't want to use CDR as an archive mechanism if you can't depend on it surviving for a consistent length of time. You see posts here saying "I've got stuff I burned 5 years ago and it works perfect", but then you also see "The thing I burned a year ago is now a toaster". Now would you entrust something that you wanted archived to a medium that you can't consistently depend on. You might not care for your mp3 collection, but those who are taking and burning tons of digital pix and sticking them on CDR/DVDR and expecting them to last as long as negatives might be in for a rude awakening ten years down the line (which is a timeframe which is nothing for photos, where one expects them to last generations).
I have never had a failure on one of my archive disks going back to 1997. But I keep these in individual cases stored vertically etc...
Stuff that is not replacable (my personal photos) I burn on two different disk types. I always use high quality disks. Using Fuji TY dvd R+ right now. I believe DVD R disks are a bit more rugged than CD R.
My car disks live in my car in Ottawa Canada. Brutal humid hot summers, I have a set of CD-r in a visor holder. Most of these disks have been in the car for 5 straight years. When I park a disk in my player it often stays for a week at a time. My CD player ejects disks so hot you don't want to touch them. Here I have a few skippers, but each one that skips is also skratched to pieces. Either way. 5 years of torture and most are still fine. I don't think any skip that are not scratched up.
I feel pretty secure about my well cared for indoor disks lasting ten years. Though I will start moving my CD-R backups to DVD.
In ten years, terrabyte storage should be common and cheap.
most of the stuff that I have on CD are free software sources anyhow and those
have source trees that exist and get updated even today so there is really no
loss. If you have looked at the majority of humans and their history not much
remains, most of the stuff that has remained have been protected by an institution such as government, religious organizations or plain rich people who can afford to ensure that a home stays in the family for generations.
Is there a product/technique that allows a coating of a consumer burned CD that would make it last longer? A second step in other words. Right now, burning a cd is like painting a car, the paint job is nice, but most people who care then apply a good wax over it to make it last. Is there an equivalent that can be done with low end quality CDs that would still allow for them to be read?
There's a correct procedure to follow, so that CDs can be used for long time storage. CDs can be successfully used to store data, even though they're so fragile. It's just necessary to do a lot of maintenance. Don't ask me about the details, I'm just writing here what I remember about this.
:= CD2 and CD2 := CD3.
1) Burn 2 identical CD-Rs
2) Store them inside some protected place, upright
3) When it's necessary to use them, use just CD1. CD2 is never used.
4) After n years, throw away CD1. (Since the guy said it takes 5 years for the CD to stop working, n should be 2.5 or less, depending on how much you use CD1). Burn CD3. Let CD1
5) Goto 2.
This is a very cheap way to store data.
My understanding is the opposite. Drives are written by 'pitting' the dye in such a way to represent data. If the disk is moving faster, there is less time for the laser to write an individual pit, and then it might lack depth. By writing a deeper pit, it would be less likely to get obscured/altered/etc in the future and thus should be more readable.
Maybe not the best explanation, but that's how I heard it and it somewhat makes sense to me.
I see alot of people burning music cd's for use in their car, and then wonder why they stop working (or skip horribly) after not long at all. It's because of the heat.
Here in south Louisiana, the inside of your car can get to literally oven temperatures for the majority of the day (if you park outside of course). I've seen new cd-r disks in the summer that become almost transparent in a matter of a month. You can literally hold the disk up, and see your hand right through it. Its because cd's are 'burned' by changing the color of the dye using heat. The heat used to burn the cd is NOTHING compared to the bowels-of-hell type heat that its submitted to in your car.
Han shot first.
Well, instead of gold discs for the general public, why not provide a cheap and easy method for everyone to press their own CDs?
I wouldn't mind submitting my photos and videos to some photography shop to press for a small fee if it ensures that I won't have a degradation problem in my archives.
Live forever, or die trying.
Magneto-optical storage is the best way to store data for long term. Keep them safe and they last 50 years, which is five times longer than optical discs, magnetic tape or hard disks will last.
In terms of conventional storage solutions available, this is the only thing that even resembles long-term.
To me the solution appears rather simple, and the AllPeers project is a step in that direction. My father, both my brothers, my newphew, two of my nieces, my wife at work and I (with three in total) all have PCs. AllPeers is a way for us to share our stuff in an easy way. This should be expanded in the following way:
AllPeers allows you to set up a "Virtual Folder" where we all throw in all of our stuff. This virtual folder can be replicated on all our harddrives, or they can use a over-the-net-using-bittorrent RAID-type solution where things are here and there. As long as most of us have AllPeers running, the data will always be accessible. Upgrading for the future will only be a matter of updating the AllPeers software.
If this became popular all future solutions, be they wrist-strapped-super-computers or brain implants, would have to include backwards compatible similar solutions, and voila all is well.
P2P saves the (data of) the World, and we are all happy.
I used to work for a med. equipment company. We included DAT drives and tapes for mass storage.
The European market required optical storage (EMP fears?), ironically. This was over 10 years ago- like in 1992 we were using MO drives, which was OK for Europe, but we also got into CD burning very early (1992). Those Plasmon SCSI drives- using DOS on 486s were touchy. Blanks cost over $10, and it was very very easy to make "coasters" at 2x recording!
I had made some for data backup and to backup some CDs of original SW, like Borland C, and I can still read them (burned in 1994) with no apparant errors. They are a very strong gold color- not the pastel or faint silver colors most new ones are.
Factory "pressed" CDs should last many decades.
I wish you could buy really good CD blanks. I don't know if those gold ones were super-high quality, and because of the market, nobody makes them anymore- only cheap crap. Anyone know?
Keep your old tapes, and the old drives!! Keep them clean. I never keep mine in a PC case- no reason to 1) keep dust sucking into them and 2) power and heat on them until you need them. I keep them in external SCSI cases and don't do backups at often as I should, but I have them if I need them.
A good plan would be to do weekly tape backups, and daily on Zip, Flash, etc.
I've found CDRW useless. Even good blanks, good drives, slow (1x or 2x) burns.
Hey- anyone for paper tape or punch cards? You can get them for pennies on Ebay!
If you time the technologies correctly, it will transfer over at 3 times the original speed.
Both the hardware and the media should be 3 times cheaper (not just per unit storage).
Still a good idea to make an off-site backup even with a RAID.
Saves against "Acts of God"
also saves against rogue Malware or OS Filesystem bugs.
Ive heard these claims before. As long as you take care of your media it should be good to go for 10-15 years or more. The 5.25in floppies i have for my Apple][ GS still work perfect, and they are about as old as I am.
I worked for CDC (Control Data Corp) and they made disc drives with names like Hawk and Wren... But the big dog of the disc drives was the SMD, it came in 300 & 80 Mb versions. They used packs. Packs were mounted, physically then logically. They had a plastic case, the cover of which could only be removed when the pack was screwed securely into a drive. The drives were about the size of a dishwasher. I miss them, I had pictures of but, well...
Originally they called these things RESOBs, changing to the name to disc drive only when the pointy haired had learnt the meaning of the acronym.
Start looking for scratched up iPods at garage sales - maybe you can make yerself a RAiP to hold yer archives until you're my age.
The 1980's called. They want their storage technology back.
For most uses for removable media, speed & versatility are more imporant factors than long-term storage.
Do any of the recorded disks still work?
I remember reading in Creative Computing about the different recordable optical formats being developed in 1985. A few companies had working Magneto-optical drives, but some companies were working on amorphous phase-change drives.
The difference was supposed to be that MO was more expensive to make, but nobody knew what the degradation lifetime of phase-change media was.
The original NeXT cube shipped with a MO drive storing about 130 MB per disk. How long did that media last?
I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things)
The thing you are forgetting, and that the original article is forgetting, and every story ever posted on this stupid idea of "archiving data" is forgetting, is that digital != analog.
In the dark ages, all data stored was analong. So, if you have a library full of books, and it burns down, you lose all the books and all the data on them. So why didn't they make backups? Of course because the cost of "backing up" a library was prohibilive (read: impossible).
Nowadays, everything is digital. And not only that, but the techn ology is moving so fast that your old media is totally obsolete every 4 years or so.
The cruz of it? Nobody *needs* drives that last longer than 5 years, because every 5 years you're going to be migrating the data onto a new drive *anyways*.
I have data on my hard drive at home from well before 1998. Does that mean that I stored it on some form of long-term storage? Of course not. Eevery time I upgrade the PC it gets re-copied, and I also have the old drive kicking around as a backup copy.
In 100 years, the only problem historians are going to have is sorting through the terrabytes of duplicated data and junk data. They're not going to be fishng around for 100 year old CDs and 100 year old hard drives, all the important data will have already been copied every 5 years and wil be stored on the global-hyper-mega-net.
What about a faraday cage?
What you want is UDO. Keeps your data safe for 50 years guaranteed.
From my point of view this means a DVD disc will last longer than a DVD player. I have replaced 3 DVD players for my TV over the past 2 years 8-).One would think that a player would last at least 5 yrs !
"blockquote>Gerecke suggests using magnetic tapes, which, he claims, can have a life span of 30 to 100 years, depending on their quality"
Speaking as a disaster recovery consultant... I heartily disagree. Hard drive storage, despite the still existant capacity for failure, is a more reliable storage medium. You're better off using disk for long-term storage, with a replacement scheme in place, rather than magnetic tape.
Optical media of higher quality (Like the Azo dye technology that Verbatim uses on their Medidisc line) will give you a great long-term storage, but at the price of limited maximum size unless you're using a jukebox system.
I think another user might have suggested it - high-capacity drives with a USB or SATA enclosure. Be prepared to swap it out every so often to ensure a 'fresh' drive.
Don't trust tape. It's susceptible to deformation (from being stretched EVERY time you use it, and even just from the tension it's held to within its own case), temperature shock (think quick hot then quick cold, or vice versa... shatter), and good ol' magnetic fluctuations, but even moreso than hard drives because of the lack of adequate shielding.
Just my $.02 .
"The difference between CD and DVD drives is one of model. My NEC DVD-ROM does a much better job of reading funky CDs than any other drive I have. Your mileage"
Well my NEC DVD-ROM doesn't. Especially since that porn CD exploded in it.
Buy Mitsui (now called MAM-A). They make both silver and archival gold discs. Their processes are the best in the industry and they'll last a LONG time.
I have several CDs (bought very cheap and with weird name brands) that were burned in 1999 and they still work great. I don't use them very often, but when I need to restore the data, it's there.
I store them in a plastic case inside my closet, so no special storage.
Things just aint made like they used to be ;)
Ive been burning CD's for over 5 years now and have only had maybe 2 that had unreadable sectors, and those have all been ones that were burned near the beginning of my burning "career". And I probably have a good 400-500 burned CD's at this point. Granted, probably at least 50% of them I've never tried using since I burned them, but overall I havent really had any problems.
Joseph?
No, but some inkjet ink manufacturers do....
*sob*
So I took all of my photos and scanned them (if they were not already digital). Then I backed them up onto CDs. Then I had my brother back them up on his RAID server. Of course I also had the printed copies and copies on my hard drive. One worm destroyed my hard drive. One house fire destroyed my CDs and printed copies. Then I found out my brother had destroyed his RAID array by upgrading incorrectly. My thinks think she's adopted because I have no pictures of her as a small child! Bottom Line? No solution is infallible.
I know the ultimate space is limited and the file transfer size might cause a professional problems, but for the casual photographer why not get youself a Gmail account and email yourself the pictures you take as you take them? 2 Gb of storage is more than enough for my current collection of digital photos. And I trust Googles backup device, whatever it is, way more than anything I could ever set up and have easy access to.
As a matter of fact I have taken to storing other important documents in this fashion. Tax returns for example, file electronically and save the documents as PDFs. Also a quick set of videos I did of the house I just bought, code to AVIs and email to myself.
Lets face it, even if you get abitious about file backups, how many of use are really going to put the time and effort into haveing something off site incase of fire/flood? Gmail solves those problems with relatively little fuss.
and backup the backup of the backup, and then backup the backup of the backup of the backup. All on different media, at different times, using different admins speaking different languages located on different contintents.
At least that's the way IBM did/does it.
I still own (and occasionaly use) discs I created in 1997 and 1998.
Statistics can be created that will verify anything.
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
CDRfaq.org has a pretty good discussion of CD-R life with links to studies from NIST and Kodak and a variety of other people. The article also suggests (without quoting its sources) that CD-Rs might last longer than pressed CDs. Can anyone confirm this?
It's also worth noting that although the researcher here said that CD-Rs would only last 5 years, many manufacturers claim that their CD-Rs will last 75 or 100 years. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between. Personally, I have CD-Rs from 5 and 6 years ago (remember when MP3.com sold burned-to-order CDs?) and they still sound fine.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
I've probably got hundreds of DVDs worth of data. But I'm currently a college student, so poor. I figure a couple years after I get out a grand won't be as _huge_ a deal for a file server with enough space to put everything from DVD on it with redundancy. I'll assume my DVDs will last 4 more years till I can do that though (I use Ritek stuff, so I figure it'll probably last long enough).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
So, everyone just got through replacing their tapes/vinyl with CDs only to find that they will degrade? No surprise the music business is so dead against ripping CDs under your fair use rights.
... we need a whistleblower quick; think of the class action suits against "Big Music"!
I wonder how long the recording industry has known this
than magnetic tape. I mean, how can he recommend that you put all of your important info and jams on a media suceptible to refridgerator magnet erasure. I recommend paper punch tape. Impervious to anything you can throw at it. Well, except water. On second thought, I recommend METALLIC punch tape. You also might want to get a PODS if your music collection is over, say, 20MB.
if due to some software error your filesystem gets corrupt, or due to a human error you type the wrong command, all your data are gone even if the raid-hw and the drives is working perfectly.
i also use drives for backup, but make a daily or weekly rsync to copy one disk to the other(s). for important data i use more than 1 generation of backup.
.
That's what I was doing for the past few years. It was so convenient to just go grab another external case and HDD. I ended up with a stack of 7 such external drives.
FOR GOD sakes do not buy the following external enclosures:
ME-320 USB2/FireWire External Enclosure
The fans get dusty and die on you (no warning sound or light) and/or the power supplies begin mis-behaving or going out of spec. I've had 5 of the 7 I bought KILL DRIVES as they quietly failed in some strange way. The drives don't just stop on their own, they start throwing tons of errors into the Windows Event Log and then a couple months latter start failing to access files.
The shop I bought them from slowly over the years is no longer carrying that line - way way too many customers reporting failures. The guy at the shop for some reason thinks it's a chipset problem, not PSU or capacitor issue.
We've got a couple of the all-metal (no fan) Brick-PSU types at work, seem to be okay so far, and the shop owner notes no big complains from customers yet (although he hasn't carried/sold them long enough yet to be certain - he's leery as they are actually made by the same company as the ME-320).
.
One word: IsoBuster.
I've had several disks over the past 10 years have "problems"... none that I had burned, but several provided to me by others, including some with critical evidence on them for legal cases. In every case, I was able to recover the data 100% with IsoBuster. I don't have an interest in the product, and there may certainly be other pieces of software out there to do the same thing.... the point is third party recovery tools have been around for hard drives for years, and the same thing is available for optical media.
I bought my first CD-R drive in 1995 and the audio CDs I burned then still work just fine - and so do the data CDs I've recently pulled old photos from. This includes no-name media of the time, Vertbatim, Ricoh, Maxell, and others.
The article is WAY wrong.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Remeber when this was the craze? ...well they ARE helical, which does allow for lots of storage. If magnetic media really does have a decent shelf life, maybe the ppl trying VHS as a backup type weren't so nutty, after all.
As all new media will soon be locked by DRM and it is illegal to circumvent copyright restrictions for any reason in the US under DMCA. Yes I mean fair use too, the Library of Congress has yet to permit any real circumvention as allowed by the act and all court cases to date have been lost except for some deal on compatible garage door openers. What this means is that in as little as 5 years, assuming no hard core usage, that any DRM protected media you have bought will degrade beyond usability and you will have no legal way to make a copy of it. How does the US congress respond to this? They say, "Well the DMCA has exceptions, ask for permission from the Library of Congress." As I already mentioned this has never happened. So, does it work, no. Does it require you to ask for permission to make fair use of content you already paid for, yes. Will this result in the destruction of your personal property, yes. Will you get compensated for this loss as required by the US Constitution when the government takes away your property, no.
This property loss issue, I think may be the basis for a challenge to the constitutionality of the DMCA. It is now very clear that the act results in the implicit seizure of our property by creating a regulation that will result in its destruction without compensating you. This challenge could work on the same principal that requires the government to pay you when they plan to flood a valley you are living in to make a dam. In truth it could be said that you still own the land, it is just under the water. It has been found in these cases that because the government has created a situation in which your property will either be destroyed or greatly damaged in value that they have in fact taken it from you as they are allowed to do under the principal of Imminent Domain but they must now compensate you as they are also required to do. This approach is interesting, because there are two ways to challenge the DMCA that are based on property rights. The first challenge can be based on the lack of a compensation clause in the DMCA to void the law. The second approach are country wide class actions suits seeking the government's compensation for the destruction of all DRM media in the US. There could be both a civil and federal approach. It would threaten the government's purse with a charge that requires the highest court of the land to finally resolve which takes a lot of time and carries the risk they may lose. The challenge is also based on something that only an amendment to the Constitution or either voiding or making many exceptions to the DMCA can stop it so they would have trouble wiggling around it. I am not sure what would happen but years of fear of losing, might change the attitudes in DC about these types of laws. What makes this approach so good is that unlike fair use, the case law is very clear on property rights and the more the industry fights to make their content be treated exactly like property the more vulnerable it will become to the laws that cover property.
Alricsca
P.S. Safety disclaimer: I am no lawyer these are just my thoughts.
I thought the generally accepted average lifespan of CD storage was 20 years. Does anyone know if DVDs are better? If you notice, the writable surface on a DVD isn't exposed like it is on a CD (on top--it can be scratched off).
;)
I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had burned CD's longer than 5 years
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
IBM 1360 Photostore
The coating and dye for D2 could not be determined and was not provided by the manufacturer.
I have a total data store of something like 600-700 gigabytes spread over a few drives. Very little of that data is irreplaceable. The majority is media (movies, music) which I obtained from physical media or the network and could conceivably do so again. It would be painful, but the data isn't totally unique so the cost of backup is greater than the risk of loss.
All I really need to back up is /etc (years worth of system tweaks and setup experience) and a small subset of /home (financial info, personal writing, etc). I also back up the MBR of all my drives; not totally necessary but I once found myself with an overwritten MBR and rebuilding the partition table was not fun.
My system backup in this way fits onto a keydrive with lots of room to spare. It's worth noting that the lifetime of the data on untouched flash memory is something like 10 years, compared to 5 years for a CDR.
Heh, I can beat that -- I was given an old "386" (actually an XT clone with an Intel AboveBoard) that had an ST225 in it. These things were ubiquitous back in the mid-80s, and it still powered up and worked! DOS 2.11 IIRC, drivers for the AboveBoard, some CAD software I'd never heard of, an old copy of Twin (a Lotus 1-2-3 clone) -- I was tempted to boot from it, but I really wasn't that interested. I was just amazed that it still worked!
Just junk food for thought...
As you well know, audiophiles have historically complained about the poor quality of digital CD recordings for their compressed frequency response range, tendency to degrade over time, and fragile nature, compared to their vaunted vinyl LPs. Abstracting on this technology, we have revised our cherished RCA Selectavision Video Disc system to the new RCA Selectavision Gold Video Disc System! Now, you too can own movie gold! Stored on a golden, grooved disc and read with a stylus, you can enjoy hundreds of years of quality video reproduction, with no fading, "laser rot", or incompatible compression schemes, just pure, high quality video reproduction!
Check out these incredible features:
Prices for this marvel start at $300 for the unit, and $2,500 per title! And, we'll even give you a trade in of $5.00 per proof of purchase for each title in your existing collection that you replace with your RCA Gold release! For a collection of 100 movies, that's a savings of nearly $500!
Call to order now!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/disccar e.html
I label cases now for my archive, instead of the disc themselves.
Unix is a standard, DOS is a standard, windows XX is not.
If that happens I don't think saving your pictures of the family trip to Disneyworld will be all that important.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
What about solid state based media, ie flash drives, etc? These work by tunneling electrons onto a metal plate floating in a layer of glass above a junction on the chip. Theoretically these should not wear out. Yes, the substrate degrades with repeated writes, but what about using say, USB flash drives or CF cards as an archiving medium? Shouldn't those last?
I have stacks of CDR's written by the first CD burner I ever used. A Kodak (Mitsui or was it a Mitsumi) back around 1997/1998. 8 or 9 years and I'm sure many others have media going back that far and further.
I do have some very cheapo CDR's which are exhibiting what looks like corrosion at the inner and outer edges of the reflective substrate (looks like a stain working its way in), but they're still reading fine. I would not bet that those will be lasting much longer, but after all these years the only discs I have actually had fail are those that were physically damaged. Dropped or scratched. The Kodak Gold CDR's that I have had for the longest time are exhibiting no visually apparent degradation at all. Besides the slight scratching that gets picked up over the years.
If he is an expert, then he needs to get back into the real World every now and then, so that he does not make embarrassing claims that can be easily refuted by anyone.
Maybe this just all has something to do with the fact that IBM's (the company he works for) storage products above the low end CD/DVD and HDD offerings cost a crap load more. Frighten that money out of people!
I'm sure CD/DVD is closest to the lowest end of the archival quality scale. But a maximum of 5 years for the better quality media is just not true. I've gone WAY past that without even trying. In fact, some of those old CDR's have been lying in tall stacks of CDR's and CDRW's on my various desks without cases or spindles. There have even been times when my cat Chomsky has knocked them over onto my lino floor during one of his late night covert hacking sessions. Those are not that important to me (really old software, etc), yet except for those that get wrecked in a instant, the rest are fine. Point being that I am not exactly taking the best care of these discs, with proper storage out of light, humidity, temperature fluctuations, etc.
If I were using some of these 100 year archival CDR's which I have seen advertised, handled them with clean hands or gloves and then stored them appropriately, I would not be surprised if they lasted more than 10 times what mine already have with dodgy treatment.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
When your whole life is porn...all of your back up problems become easily solved with the Internet.
Seriously though, I'm wondering what will last longer, the CD-Rs I burned in the early 90s, or the myths about how long CD-Rs will last.
I knew that I was making the right choice when I put the travan head unit in my car instead of a cd or dvd player! SURE it take an hour and a half to find the 3 minute song i'm looking for but hey.. whatch gonna do!
I was just accessing a 10 year old Kodak Photo disc this last week. Read it in my current machine with no trouble at all. (The disc was dated by Kodak as 10/96 for the second roll of film on it.) I have a couple more that are as much as 12 years old and have had no trouble yet.
I have 5 burned CD's I am looking at right now that have been stored very very poorly and still are readable. All 5 of these were burned 6 years ago. I see no sign of them giving up anytime soon.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
More info
The 100 year archival quality CD's were only the pressed CD-ROMs made with high quality dies... not the mass procuced CDs that AOL ships out and especially not CD-Rs.
The other thing to consider is the chemical stability of the dyes that are used for the creation of the CD-Rs that you are using. Some companies (like Mitsui and presumably Kodak) put quite a bit of effort into the quality of the dyes and having them work on multiple CD readers as well. These are likely to last much longer than the 50 cent CDs that you can pick up at your local discount store like Wal-Mart.
The real question would be who is marketing and specing CD-R manufacturing for archival quality CDs and have specs guarenteeing that they will last 10+ years without failing? There must be somebody out there doing that, but I don't know of them myself.
The problem is that the whole concept of arhival storage is no longer workable in the "digital age". Non-electronic media doesn't have enough capacity to store the volume of data we generate today, and electronic media are constantly becoming obsolete. The solution is to give up trying to "archive" data. Just keep it live. Most people upgrade their computer(s) every few years, and each time they upgrade their data storage to a newer system and/or higher capacity. Hard disks are big enough today to store most people's entire data collection, and capacity is growing exponentially. So just keep all your data on a live disk (or disks), back it up regularly on another hard disk, and copy both to new media when you upgrade your computer. Your data will never die.
I've read similar articles a few times saying that they won't last over 5 years.. if that's true, then why do all of the old burnt CDs I have (well over 5 years old) still work? Well I haven't tested all of them.. but the three that I still use regularly are fine.
What about a faraday cage?
My guess [and certainly my hope] would be that at a place where security really matters, like NORAD, they've got multiple redundancy:
BTW, IANAP, so I'm assuming that there isn't some weird quantum polarization thingamabob that would render multiple Faraday cages useless.But out in the field, I think they use lead shielding.
When you have an important info - burn it on a gold master cdr. Depending on the brand the life is supposed to be 100 to 400 years. They cost $1.50 in bulk.
0 8.shtml
o ld.html
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq10
http://store.mam-a-store.com/standard---archive-g
Maybe IBM CD-R media really do only last a few years. It would be consistent with the life expectancy of a series of hard drives IBM released that were dying in under 1 year. I guess they didn't get enough pixie dust on them.
If that happens I don't think saving your pictures of the family trip to Disneyworld will be all that important.
Recall the evil "Neutron Bomb" program that was killed back in the Carter era: The tactical idea at that time was that the radiation from a Neutron Bomb would kill all the humans within a certain radius [especially Warsaw Pact tank crews], but that it would leave the physical infrastructure [buildings, bridges, dams, canals, etc] largely intact.
But the strategic idea of a low orbital nuclear detonation is to produce exactly the opposite effect: In theory, it would destroy all the electronic infrastructure of a society, but it would leave the human population largely unharmed [to the extent that we can survive anymore without an electronic infrastructure].
I had a couple of CDs I burned circa 98/99 go bad. Kodak CD-Rs that had the type of dye that makes burned ones obvious. When I went to use them later (2 years?) and couldn't, the dye had visibly faded. Beyond that I haven't had a significant problem with data CDs.
Burned audio CDs have been flawless, despite extermes of cold and heat from a northern climate. I have some audio CDs in my car that I burned back in 2000 that still work. The only problems I've had have been scratches from mishandling, but even that hasn't been that bad considering that they get "stored" in a visor-mounted holder, stacked on each other in the dash, or just generally flung around the car.
I don't know if audio CD longevity has anything to do with data CD longevity, my understanding is that audio CD codecs can do some interpolation that a PC can't, but I also understand that data CDs do have some kind of parity/redundancy at the physical layer.
30 Year Optical discs:
http://www.ritekusa.com/ebproductdetail.asp?id=43
Features
* Re-Writable DVD
* Speed up to 8X
* Book version: DVD Specifications for Re-recordable Disc Version 1.1
* Rewrites up to 1,000 times
* 7 times the storage capacity of CD-R
* Durable, long lasting archives
*** Storage acceleration tests guarantee safe storage for more than 30 years
* Compatible with most leading readers and writers
* Utilizes premium organic dye that ensures stable writing with excellent quality
Use CD/DVD media that has a high quality dye and your data will last longer. I use Mitsui CDRs for data that I want to last a while. They use high quality dye and thier optical media products are among if not the best in the industry. http://www.mam-a.com/
High quality media along with proper storage will help your data last longer. As to what the ultimate in long term data storage is, I have no idea. Pressed CDs maybe? I suppose magnetic tape as TFA says isn't that bad but it has its issues too.
Tape backup? Why not just keep a couple spare hard drives installed and backup all your data to the both of them? That should be more than solid enough for most people's personal files.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Find all the old 8-tracks and 8-track players you can get your hands on. It's going to be the storage solution for the 21st century!
Is there a HowTo/mod to make a toaster into a linux powered 8-track writer yet? That'd be hawt!
"who thinks that there's any real long-term solution other than to just re-copy to the latest format and pray"
Good point. Entropy exists (is that an oximoron?) but the issue is far deeper than that.
Long term for me mean at least two generations (e.g. something I could give to my kids to worry about)
We could probably come up with ways for stuff to last a great deal longer but there is no financial incentive. The pyramids existed for thousands of years. If you look over their lifetime--they probably were an excellent investment as they even today have value.
One unfortuntate aspect of modern living is that we function on the concept new-is-always-better. While this is often true (not always) it does have drawbacks. Things are not made to last since obsolesence is expected and durability usually adds cost and decreases sales.
Furthermore we tend to be selfish. We want what's good for us and screw future generations (e.g. global warming, over population, nuclear weapons, etc..). Unfortunately this is poor reasoning that ultimately effects every generation negatively since we end up carrying new problems forward generations. We do make some long term investments in infrastructure where the costs are too enormous to risk sacrificing to immediate convenience--- but this is generally the exception not the rule.
All is not a lost though. As long as solutions and expansion outpace our ability to create problems we're fine but we just need to make sure we don't leave too many of them around or else the burden becomes impossible to manage and civilizations decline. We are at particular risk of this today since the world is populated from end to end so until the cost of space travel decreases--we have no more room to expand
Something has to give not too far into the future. Either we start building things to last or the mountains of ecological damage we are doing will cause a decline in civilization until an equalibrium is once again reached.
The Mac OS X platform, at least, has a shareware offering (DV Backup) that lets you back up your hard drive to DV tapes using your camcorder and FireWire connection. Anyone know what the life expectancy of such a backup media might be?
Ive found this out myself, having been one of the first to start using CDrs for archives..Got burnt bad on this. Some important documents were totally lost. The disks were stored in a good environment and hadn't been touched since the day they were burnt/verified.
Recordable DVDs are worse. However tapes from 20 years ago are still readable ( IF you can find the hardware to do it on )
I have found too that if you can find an older CDROM drive ( like a 4speed ) they tend to work better in recovering the data on the old 'questionable' disks.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Paper tape was the original distribution medium for recorded music.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Make sure you store them vertically in a cool dry place.
My personal take on this is that although I certainly have burned CDs well over 5 years old, I would only ever RELY on quality discs lasting 5 years. After that surely new copies are in order... If it's really precious data, opt for the 2 year lower limit!
If you buy cheap discs they will fail. I have noted some diss are so cheap that they are basically the dye sprayed on top of a plastic disc. You can scratch off the dye. CHEAP. Get Yaiyo Uden's or Mitsumi golds They are sealed. with plastic (not another paint) They work! Bedammit
blueray is expected to last 1year
hddvd is expected to last 15minutes.
Oops Thats Mitsui Gold Mitsumi was the company that made my second CDROM drive. :D
Bedammit
Hell I use permanent ink on discs all the time, never had an issue.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
3 years ago, I switched away from CD's and DVD's as a backup medium. Last year, HDDs provided more storage per dollar than tape. When I recieve a CD as part of a game or CAD install software, I use dd or Alcohol 120% to create a disk image on my RAID 5 array. Then I use virtual disks to mount the images over the network. Works for DVD movies as well.
I've had 1 drive that I used smartctl to catch - replaced the drive and rebuilt the array inside of an hour.
I have not lost my email archive, photos, or files (cough...porn...cough) at all in this time. Personally, I think that people are going to look on early 21st century as the time when we started saving all of our useless crap, but I think it's going to be a marvelous historical archive. ("Hey, look! Here's all of Dad's old college term papers!")
Hell, I keep entire HDD images of my laptop drive on the array. If my laptop drive dies, I can dd over the image to a new drive, dual boot configuration and all.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
how has this hit news sites? this has been known since the inception of CDs. There are some CDs that are only designed to live 1-2 years. It depends on the ink used. Years ago, I used to only buy CDs with gold ink because they had a 20 year expected life span. silver (pressed) cds are expected to live up to 100 years.
Nowadays people are mixing inks, so it's a bit more complicated, but this isn't news.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I have to wonder if IBM got new tape drive out soon or is this a hidden drive for the LTO market.
:o).
:D.
All that said its the heat and sunlight exposure that seem to be the main issues, as such wouldn't we finaly have a justifiable excuse to the boss to buy a frigde so you can store backups in safty
I can see it now, err boss my CDR's i use keep getting overheated and ruined in this brightrly light office. I need something that is small and easy to store them in at a lower tempreture. Now I saw this mini beer fridge the other day and its perfect
Advertising spew:
= 517590
Patented Phthalocyanine dye formula that gives a storage life of 300 years.
Gold is one of the most reflective robust elements on Earth. More than 20 of 24k gold in every CD-R.
Maximum resistance to the harmful effects of oxidation, a main cause of failure to optical media.
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno
How come noone has mentioned flash media? What's the lifespan of your data on that 1GB thumb drive? Seems perfect because there are now moving parts to fail.
My experience is that aged cheap CDs don't last forever. I haven't seen it often but I have had a couple of these that looked perfect and worked before but don't any longer. My storage conditions aren't perfect but are okay (they are in my house so the temp doesn't fluctuate that much). I use paper labels and test them after burning and then put them in a paper envelope before putting them in a plastic CD case.
My experience isn't significant to prove things one way or another but I would guess that two or three percent of the writable CD's that I've stored over a year or two have died when I went back to them. Until I read this, I always felt that incompatibility between drives was probably to blame. A lot of the disks were written on a Win95 machine that had a 4x burner in it. I now have a XP machine that has a 56 x burner. The last time I probably accessed these disks was when I had a Win 98 machine with a 16 x drive.
They are just JPGs and I can get to them other ways but I have to say, I'd really be bothered if ten years from now my archive was just dust. These are treasures that my kids and grand-kids will probably enjoy (just like I enjoyed my parents and grandparents photos). The problem is I am not sure that mag-tape is going to be easily accessible half a decade from now either. Just try finding someone who has an 8mm projector to look at those old family movies.
The Floppy of the Future if Sony ever lets it out of the nursery. Sure, it is DRMed up the butt but then lack of DRM is the main reason that no floppy substitute has been forthcoming. More capacity than a CD-RW, more compact and hardy enough you can put it in your front pocket without worry even if your name ain't Steve Jobs
Use SATA RAID for your backup instead of CD/DVD. It's faster anyway. If you need offsite backup use an external hard drive. Faster, more reliable, and less troublesome than a stack of CDs.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
http://www.mandelbrot-dazibao.com/Programs/Program s.htm
Has a copy, so do plenty of other sites. FreeBASIC http://freebasic.net/ also compiles many QuickBASIC Programs if they are saved in Text and not Quick format.
Unless I'm in a time warp: I have some CD-Rs I made in 1998, when I got my first CD burner. I was recently scouring through these, putting interesting stuff on DVDs. They worked perfectly. As long as they're stored properly,I would expect them to last forever. (In a jewel case, in the dark, in a cool place like a basement, etc.) Also, use decent brands - not no-name blanks. The only CDs I have ever had fail were no-name CDs with a sticker-like top that peeled off in a case where they were inserted into plastic sleeves (not jewel cases) - any modern CDs like Maxell should be fine. I like Maxell and Memorex color CDs, because they make them to their specs and don't buy whatever is cheapest that week. I also like the Maxell CD-R Pros - I copied my CD collection to those recently.
Does anyone have info (or predictions) about the longevity of the next-gen DVD technologies (Blu-ray, HD-DVD)?
Classic!
Any a person who was working as a recording engineer studio during the days that the ADAT and DA-88 systems came on the market can appreciate this.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
got my first burner in october of 97. Burned a few that i've kept on to and they still work in any drive, and suprizingly, they are the few that work in EVERY drive i've tried whereas some burns from a later burner are sort of flaky.
I guess I'd better convert my p0rn collection to MPEG to secure it for future generations. Thanks, Slashdot!
I have several CDs older than 5 years that are fine.
Some of my oldest computer games are about 5 years old, and geuss what? I can still play them. Hell, I don't take very good care of my CD's and they each have a thousand scratches, but they still work! The part where the information is actually stored is where the CD is vulenerable. You know, the thin front of the CD, opposite to the shiny side? If you scratch off that part of the disc all you have left is a clear plastic disc! Scratch the plastic side all you want and you can still fix it,however the side that usually has a label or picture on it is the vulnerable side.
"pick another media"!!
Media is the plural of medium.
Don't they teach you kids any Latin these days?
It was written about 1995, with an old 1x cd writer. It took a whole hour to finish it. And i am reading it now.
It all depends on the special reactive die that the data gets burnt onto. If the cd is green or light blue, the disks are made with cyanine dyes which are chemically unstable and will not last for a very long time. Typically are the budget/midrange blank cd's and expect to get these on a spool. Dark blue cd-r's are created with azo dyes and will be rated to last for several decades. The only azo dyed discs I've ever had are old playstation 1 game discs, I have several of which are more than 10 years old and still play fine without a problem, even though most of them are scratched. Phthalocyanine dye is used in the high end cd's, it is also a chemically stable die and is usually light green, gold, or silver. This dye will result in a lifetime longer then your own, given that it is not abused. If you care about your data this is where it should be burnt, typically premium cd's such as kodak-gold cd's would be made with these dyes. None of this information is really every advertised on the packaging, but there is a huge difference in quality between the cheap cd-rs and expensive "gold" cd-rs. If you plan to archive your data for the long term, buy some name brand cd's that appear overpriced, and make sure that the color matches one of the desirable colors listed above.
Yes tape is better. I actually still have a few reels of computer data tape from the 1970's it's 1/2 inch tape recored at 6250BPI. It's on a 10 inch reel. Who really knows if thedata are still readable, I'd have to find 1/2 reel to reel tape drive to find out. In my collection I also haver an 8 inch floppy drive. These were common in the late 70's also. It holds 160MB of data. A what about the paper tape. Yes I still have some. It is 100% readable too at least by eye. I've not seen o used a teletype machine with paper tape reader in years. So, so much for media stability. That's not the issue the problem is the long term availability of readers OK, here are my rules for keepping data ...
1) To be safe three copies of the data must exist at all times
2) The data must exist at two or more diffent geographical locations
in case of fire, flood, Earthquake
3) Every few years you have to make another copy of the data on the
"best" meadia type that is in wide use.
I just finished copying stacks of old analog video tape to digital and
now I'm slowly doing rough edits (culling the crud) and saving the digial
files to DVD.
In the long run I expect that people will use incremental backups ofver the Internet to some on-line backup/archive provider will be the best option for most home users. Unless you shoot more than an hour of video per week even DSL is fast enough
Well, i just copied my old game collection off disks. Out of 120 5-1/4" disks only about 4 were unreadable. Out of 100 3-1/2" disk there were about 5-6 unusable. The handful of pressed CDs were readable. My old backup tape (huge old cartridge) was ok. The newer backup i made on TR-5 tape was ok, except for a bad file of no consequence.
;), to the other drive.
:( They still degrade and finding the right drive/drivers is a royal pain. Tho i do have a TR-5 drive and tapes saved. These were hooked to the floppy drive channel tho and may or maynot work on a given new computer :( Pretty much down to: Find an old (pentium2 was ok)system or use the Backup for the Backup drive (ok i was pretty anal at one point) a Parallel Port version! Hope i never need anything for those now because 'now' would be days to get it back off probably !
Upgraded my 386 with 2 540mb HD (biggest MB would recognize) via ebay and copied everything there. Then xcopy the whole thing , eventually
Interesting that the oldest disks had one of the higher read rates. Unfortunately that dropped on disks of useable capacities (2 of maybe 12 for the 1.2m disks)
Tapes as an alternative wouldnt seem any better than cd
I vote for using a HD whether new, used, or obsolete.
In fact i think i'll set up an enclosure at work to recycle these old bigfoot drives. I only need a couple gig of data in any one backup and they are damn sturdy little buggers.
While the new tape drive seems to work great, i have no clue on readabilty or lifespan. Small 20G SCSI in an IBM eserver. Vendor gave no way to test the backup solution tho its much faster than i thought.
i've got 9-10 yr old discs, work just fine.
weird...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
How long a CD-R or CD-RW lasts isn't important. How long will a writable Blu-Ray or a writable HD-DVD disc last? Everyone is going to migrate their data to those formats in the next ear or two anyway.
Not to forget the content industry. At least they'd like to.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I spent $20/100 on memorex. Threw the whole spindle away. Was'nt worth wasting the time on failed burns.
It was obvious that the writer did not understand what he was writing. Nothing about the article is reliable. The Slashdot editors should not have posted it.
Don't pay ANY ATTENTION to brand name in general. Only the media code (MID) tells the story. You can read it with various utilitys but cannot see it. Do research before buying a large spindle or you will wind up trashcanning the 100 spindle of name brand discs you just bought for $20 (like I did).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If I make copies of a disk, is there software that can later determine which sectors have gone bad, and put together a new working copy?
Most often I've seen either improperly encoded video or missing AUDIO_TS folders.
Isn't AUDIO_TS supposed to be for DVD-Audio, while VIDEO_TS is for DVD-Video?
Also note that NOWHERE ON THE SITE does he discuss or show his method of putting data onto vinyl records. Nowhere I could find, anyway.
+++ATH0
I have about 250+ VHS tapes, some of which I recorded as long as 15 years ago. All but 2 or 3 have remained playable (one or two won't track well, and one was eaten by a VCR with a voracious appetite). I have purchased other tapes from flea markets, estate sales, etc. (usually of oddball shows or news coverage that has never been released to DVD) that date well back to the early 80's (25 years ago), and they have played with no problems. Yes, I have transfered all of this stuff to DVD, BUT I kept the VHS originals. Since they are well-stored and not being played, if one of the DVDs fails, I will just pop the original back in a machine and do another burn.
This is one of the great things about IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager software (ok not quite cheap for home use, but in business...)
It treats the data as one thing and the storage as something else again. You move your data around between disk, tape etc without really caring what it's on.
For example, I've migrated from old IBM3570 media (omfg what crap) to LTO1 and I'm about to move to LTO3.
I don't have to restore/backup anything, just tell TSM to move the pool of data from one media type to another and make sure the library has enough tapes.
There are backups "in there" from over 5 years ago and I'm still able to read them despite any changes in media I have implemented.
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
Again, if that happens I don't think saving your pictures of the family trip to Disneyworld will be all that important.
Look, the pics of the trip to Disneyworld might not be all that big a deal.
But, as a slightly different example, my Dad has been working on a family genealogy for more than fifteen years now [started on an Apple IIe, moved to a NeXTStation, then to NT 4.0/Windows 2000 on a gray box], and at this point, he's in the general vicinity of 1000 pages of edited/proof-read text.
Now his little genealogical history of our family has absolutely no financial value whatsoever - I doubt he'd get any buyers if he offered a PDF version of it at $0.99 [the raw format is LaTeX], and yet every night a script [that I wrote] backs it up to three different harddrives within his house and then FTPs it to his account at the university.
Point being that if the Red Chinese were to attack us, detonate an EMP warhead in low orbit, and knock out continental electronics for two or three years, until we [the USofA] got back on our feet again, then I'd still like to have a copy of those files for my enjoyment in the brave new post-EMP world of the future.
And I imagine there are gazillions of other amateur writers [and their families] out there who feel the same way.
I know many users are supporting further propagation for nofollow links, but I'd like to see the attribute removed from high-ranked, on-topic comments. If a post gets +4 Insightful, Interesting, etc, I think it deserves to have its links spidered. Moderators are generally pretty good about modding down link whores.
The problem with starving artists is that someone will usually end up feeding them right before they are to expire... thus keeping this populance at a null growth trending group. Usually right after they get the munchies and go on the prowl for brownies...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Actually, vinyl records will outlast *all* of the digital formats - about 100 or more years in fact. Why is it that there are Edison Cylinders still listenable after over a century, yet I've heard lately so much talk about data obsolescence in both the entertainment and computer software fields? Perfect sound forever, anyone?
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
I'd have had better luck translating the files into 300 baud audio files and transcribing them onto vinyl LPs.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Consumer audio media lasts a *long* time relative to computer media, and copying audio from media to media is, well, pretty easy -- we've always had good tools for that. You just need to document your encoding format and then start recording.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
My Tapes never survive more than 2-3 years but most if not all my CDRs from ten years ago are still fine and so are my CDRs from five years and my few DVDR from two years ago.
But I have something which surrelly outlives them all and is much cheaper also:
A RAID5.
I have a RAID5 from 1997 around, 4x4GB SCSI. It was switched off most time to reduce stress on the parts but I expect it work for many, many more years. And if one drive fails... hey, its a RAID5.
Then I have another RAID5 made from 5x9GB from 2001. Still working like a charm. I have left them inside the computer from that age so I just have to power up and telnet to the box to access my backup.
And my nowadays RAID5, 4x160GB from 2003, soon going to be update with a "RAID6" with 6x250GB. The old 4x160GB-drives will be put either inside a USB-case or into another computer for easy powerup+telnet-access.
Also I think ethernet and telnet/ssh will be the best option for a longliving standard.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Just pass down your legacy in stories at the campfire. Everyone hears them and remembers. As long as your whole village is wasted, your data will live on...
No offense, but that article sucks, here is a better one: http://www.warehousephoto.com/How_Permanent_is_you r_CD-R.htm
All documentation I've read on CD life expectancy has estimated a 15-20 year life for a standard CD-R. Medical grade or archival CD-Rs come with a estimated life expectancy of 100-300 years. I suppose no one has kept one in storage for that long, but I do think the medical grade CD-R is the way to go for longterm archival purposes.
I don't know ... if the whole village is wasted, yur data isn't going to survive the communal hangover ...
for my long term archives i use this tool for added protection:
http://www.ice-graphics.com/ICEECC/IndexE.html
The ink in permanent markers can dissolve or distort the media. I burned a music compilation for my daughter (yes I own all the original CDs, they're from before the days RIAA worried about stuff like this), and wrote on it with a Sharpie marker. She went further and drew on it including several dark blobs. A few months later the disk was shot, with a big black hole on the play side matching one of the dark blobs she drew in.
We are the 198 proof..
LOL, I mean to actually say that as long as your whole village isn't wasted (as in slaughtered by Anakin Skywalker in a fit of rage), your oral traditions will live on.
I just noticed that I first wrote that DVD-ROM is supposed to be the best choice for backups. That's nonsense (as a DVD-ROM backup would require the use of DVD pressing equipment), I meant DVD-RAM.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I like my way better. It helps explain most of the worlds religions, and ALL politics.
It also explains the Pope's dismay to the first question he asked God when he got to the Pearly Gates.
You can guess the question. God answered him, "No, I said CELEBRATE, not CELIBATE!"
Which can fry all your hard drives at once.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the magneto-optical drives/discs. They were the bee's knees in the early 90's and have a 100 year or so lifetime. I have a Pinnacle Micro Apex 4.6G MO drive and discs that run on my Performa. I just wish I could find a driver for OSX or linux.
Be heard || Be herd
I can confirm much shorter ones -- weeks, in fact. Personally, I would much prefer tape. HDs seem to be the way to go for me.
When I was in the USAF, I did a study on data storage just after CD's started becoming popular in computers, around 1991. I don't have the study to post, since it was military, but I do recall most of the findings. This dude is correct to a point. CD's burnt last only a few years. I had one delaminate just the other day that was only a year old. A bit longer for burnt DVDs. Pressed CD's last a loooooong time. We couldn't tell at that time, but our estimate was 10+ years. I've got some CD's approaching 16 now, and they're still fine. Mag tape is where it gets fun. If you use a mag tape with a metal plate, you've got six months max before you see lots of errors, degrading in a year to pretty useless. If you use a non-metal cartridge, you've got 1-2 years. If you use a 9-track, you get 10+ years. Neat. Blackwatch, you guys can kick me back some dough if you start selling more tapes. I was unable to test the modern tapes at the time, since they weren't around, but I doubt it's gotten much better. We just did a DR at my place and half the DLT's had errors. And with tape, the age of the media does affect retention even if the data is fresh. In other words, if you put new data on an old tape, it's just as bad as it was before. Sounds obvious, but you know someone will ask. It's the stretching, warping, etc... Hard drives hold data pretty much in line with mtbf. The main reason I like tape more than and disk format, is the ease of partial recovery. If I've got records on a tape, and records an a CD, and they both break in half, I can recover 99% of the tape with minimal effort, but the disk will have to go to an expensive lab, and I'll probably only get 80-90%.
Yes, I've had CD's that have failed (I've even got a CD lying around with a piece of paper sellotaped to it that details which byte is incorrect on the disk - I noticed a one-byte descripency on the burned disk to the original data about a month after writing it. To this day, hexediting that particular byte makes the CD pass an MD5 check!) but in general my disks just keep going.
Personally, I've not got much that requires long-term storage (photos, websites, some code, graphical works, financial records etc.) but I reckon the critical stuff (that which I would be very upset to lose) adds up to about a GB and is mirrored everywhere, even to the point where every month I swap backup CD's with my brother who lives 20 miles away and we store them at each other's houses (he has something like 9Gb of critical data).
I've also got several hard drives (200Gb+ in total) full of data that would be a pain to lose but that I probably wouldn't pay to have recovered. To date, losses have been minor to say the least.
In all the time that I've been using PC's, my primary storage medium has always been hard disks and CD/DVD-R's (and before that floppies but that doesn't count any more). In 15 years, over about 20-odd hard drives including two 75GXP that are still going strong, I've had *one* critical failure of a 20Mb hard drive (that just shows how long ago that was!) and everything but the OS itself was already backed up on floppy!
I think the key to backups is not what media, but the magic word of redundancy - don't rely on one medium to always work as advertised. Don't rely on your hard drive to keep it all. Don't think that tape will still work in 10 years time. Don't believe that the filesystem will even be supported in that timeframe! Back up to everything you've got, scratch that, back up to TWO of everything you've got, if not more.
I always have two copies of things on my hard disk - normally I have two drives in any PC I build for exactly this purpose. It's not worth backing up Windows etc., things like Ghost Images are extremely useful in the event of a crash but there's little point keeping them for years. I have several backups spread over the hard drives that are usually on different filing systems, ones I can almost guarantee to be able to read in 10 years time, corruption or not (Ext3 / FAT). I even include the tools to read them each time (they may get outdated, but at least there is some way to read them in the future, even if it means booting a FreeDOS disk image from a USB key!)
I regularly copy the important stuff to other locations - my girlfriend's PC, my brother's linux router (which is specially equipped with RAID and SSH for me to do so), my own router (similarly set up for him), my USB keys, my laptop, every one of my FTP spaces (several) and for small files every one of my email addresses.
All this is just automated scripting of backups - I don't need to lift a finger for the above to occur. But I don't rely on those scripts to save my data. Although they are specially designed so that they NEVER overwrite previous backups (we manually delete older ones if it ever fills up, which is rare), I don't trust them not to do that. Hence, I burn the critical stuff to CDR and DVDR and distribute copies to people willing to store it for me (my brother, who also swaps his backups with a trusted computer-literate friend etc.)
Occasionally I will add error-recovery info as well (it's in the automated backups already), using tools such as RAR files with the right options or things like PAR. I always include a current copy of the relevant program with the backup too. This is mainly to guard against media deterioration, something no backup mechanism can really cope well with.
I used to use tape until I realised that a) it was getting ludicrously expensive b) the backups took forever and interfered with my usage of the computer, even when automated as much as I could get, and c) the *two* brand new tape drives (one for use, one put into storage fro
Definitely a good idea to keep the originals. I have mine stored in a cool dry place as well once I converted them to DVD.
If they were bought tapes or tapes of TV shows I only bothered to create a single DVD with a moderate amount of PAR2 data. Worst case, I can always rebuy the program on DVD.
Stuff I don't think I can replace gets the 2-disc treatment with ample amounts of PAR2 data on the discs.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I have, right next to me on my desk, a stack of 1x CDRs that I burned back in 1996 on my double-height SCSI 1x CD burner. There are several different brands, but the majority of them are Maxell and Verbatim.
Each and every one of them still works perfectly. And no, I have not stored them vertically in a cool, dry place. Some of them were left on the front seat of my car, under the seats in my car, and various other random places.
On these CDs I have backups of web sites I used to work on, horrifically low-res quicktime video clips of Babylon 5, and a ton of MP3s. Yes, MP3s from 1996. No ID3 tags, and in ALL_UPPERCASE because of the Joliet/ISO FS wars from the time, but still perfectly listenable. Many of them ripped and converted on mindbogglingly slow 200MHz machines before MMX, and many of them downloaded over HTTP from web sites back before P2P was even thought of.
So, yeah, the article is bunk. My stack of nine-and-a-half year-old CDRs is working just fine, thank you.
Something many articles fail to mention in regards to long term archiving is magnetic waves damaging the media. Don't nuclear blasts have a magnetic wave that will wipe out any magnetic media? If so, then some form of optical storage would seem necessary. Of course, there is always the argument that if we have a nuclear blast, we are screwed -- but imagine a small one just out of direct harms way, and you have important historical data stored... all gone. Also, I have seen many people suggest 2 copies stored in different locations -- but I like to take this one step further... two copies on TWO different name brands of media stored in different locations. What if one manufacturor had a bad run of CDs?... having two copies will be useless. I remember an article a few years back that said audio CD's were degrading too (from the 80s) -- apparently temperature shifts can cause the metal to separate from the plastic. Lastly, anyone notice how high the failure rate of 1.44 MB floppy disks is right of the box? I seem to find bad ones all the time... compare that to my floppies from the 80s, we use to punch a hole and use the backside (which was suppose to be the lower quality side) all the time and have a pretty good success rate.
I like your way better too, actually. There's a good 'History of the World' spoof there, with a drunk Moses...
Your country cassette from a truck stop that you have stored under the seat of your pickup truck wont play? And this suprises you?
We arent talking about crappy consumer music tape here, the quality and life of real backuptapes are a bit better.
You also have to store your media properly. That is an important part of the formula for long term data retention.
---- Booth was a patriot ----