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How To Properly Archive Data On Disc Media
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, the well-known Free Software Magazine author, goes into great detail on CD/DVD media over at the Ad Terras Per Aspera site. McFarland covers the history of the media, from CDs through recordable DVDs, explaining the various formats and their strengths and drawbacks. The heart of the article is an essay on the DVD-R vs. DVD+R recording standards, leading to McFarland's recommendation for which media he buys for archival storage. Spoiler: it's Taiyo Yuden DVD+R all the way. From the article: 'Unlike pressed CDs/DVDs, burnt CDs/DVDs can eventually fade, due to five things that affect the quality of CD media: sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices (please keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media).'"
This is practically a word-for-word dupe of a /. posting from December 11th 2006
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I know who he is. I would've never called him a "famous free software writer" as he was labeled earlier today, and if he's "well-known", it's not for being a writer. The way these summaries are worded, as well as the fact that both stories today were submitted by "an anonymous user", just makes me think that somebody is looking to boost their site's traffic today. Nevermind the fact that the article is old and has already been linked to on slashdot before.
Anyway, just seemed fishy to me. That's my $0.02.
At $150 a 500gb drive is $.30/GB. At american-digital.com (my personal favorite place for bulk media), I can get 16x Taiyo Yuden dvd+r media for about $.60/disc; which, at 4.7GB/disc, works out to $.128/GB. So hard drives are more than twice as expensive per gigabyte as DVD+R.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A quick primer: you can "error scan" DVD+/-R media with a drive that supports it. CDSpeed, a [free, IIRC] utility distributed by/with Nero, can easily save these scans. DVD enthusiasts often compare their scans... cdfreaks.com is a great discussion site.
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Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=1733269&p
Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].
The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33
Magneto-Optical media is used by medical facilities where archival time length is paramount. Such as:
- http://md5.ca/~pavel/md.jpg
- http://tinyurl.com/2cu7zv
MO drives are a bit costly, but if you have important media its worth it. Besides cool look for neo's warez stash in Simulcara book. Quoted guaranteed archival time is over 40 years in most cases, and they continually improving the technology, compared to driving the costs down of the generic blank media market of CDs/DVDs.
Magneto Optical Disc Probably the cheapest comsumer priced devices are Sonys HIMD which are pc compatible, although even these are getting hard to find too. People dont like good technology it seems.