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."

Comments

5 years max?

[blanktek]

I have CDs that have lasted 10 years with no errors. Obviously 5 years is not the maximum life. Perhaps the maximum EXPECTED life.

CD-Rs with a 100 year warranty

[OverDrive33]

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!!

Re:Conflicts with other studies

[metternich]

I've had burned CDs die very quickly as well though. Therefore the only solution is to upload your music onto P2P netwroks to save the back up copy fair use entitles you to.

Instead of tape why not drives for long term?

[portwojc]

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.

Or my money back?

[winkydink]

Great. I lose hundreds of precious photos. They give me a buck.

Re:I can attest to that...

[jridley]

I have had many problems with DVDs. I've had media that degrade quickly, and also writers that cause discs to degrade quickly. Every disc I wrote in late 2003 is bad. They started going bad after only a few months (in some cases, days).

I switched both burners and media and now have no problems. However, I still do a 100% verify, and don't totally trust DVD-R. For stuff I *really* want backed up, I put a PAR2 set on the disc, and I burn both DVD and at least one CD copy for offsite.

BTW I found that some really crappy DVD-ROM drives will read almost anything. All of those hundreds of bad discs that I have? I bought a shitty CompUSA DVD-ROM drive for $35, and it will read them all, even though NO other drive I own will read them (I tried Sony, 2 NEC, 1 Pioneer and 1 Lite-On DVD-R drives, plus Teac, Pioneer DVD-ROM drives). I have NO reasonable theory why this is, but the damn thing just reads anything. I'm glad of it too. I discovered this when I realized that my shitty $40 mintek set-top DVD player would play the discs and "better" players choked, so I decided to try a crappy DVD-ROM drive. So I can now make new copies of the messed-up discs.

Screw that - I'm going back to stone tablets

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:Screw that - I'm going back to stone tablets

[Shadow Wrought]

Just to add some weight to the equation, 100,000 pages of paper (a pallet) weighs roughly a ton (all those years at Xerox were good for something;-). So your "back-up" would weigh in at right around 3,500 pounds, or the weight of a Run of the Mill Sedan (RMS). As we all know, RMS is also the abbreviation commonly used when prolestizing about Gnu. Gnu is an anagram for "Gun."

So, the moral of the story- it'll take a ton of work, but it's worth a shot.

Re:Conflicts with other studies

[TIMxPx]

Yes, studies sponsored by the CD media consortium. Wonder who sponsored this latest study?

Umm, the tape backup consortium?

Re:Museum Archives

[Merle Darling]

I don't know about you guys, but my data always feels "warmer" when I read it from an LP-ROM. I can't explain it any better than that, you can just FEEL it, man! CDs are cold and digital, there's no love there.. Look, all I'm saying is that when I'm in the mood for some soulful gaming I bust out my copy of Quake4 on vinyl, none of this crap you'll find on CD (or worse, DVD) feels RIGHT, MAN!! VINYL FOREVER!!11 DEATH TO THE OPTICAL OPPRESSORS!!1111