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Up To 10% of CD-Rs Fail Within a Few Years
Whatever you think about the likelihood that a new kind of DVDs could last for 1,000 years, this note from reader crazyeyes should give you pause about expecting current CD-Rs to be reliably readable for decades. TechARP found a failure rate near 10% for CD-Rs recorded 7 to 9 years ago, after storage in ideal conditions. On some, one or more individual files could not be recovered; others were not reliably readable on two separate drives. "In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs. As it became common to store backups and personal pictures, videos, etc. on CD-Rs, the lifespan of these discs became a concern. According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades. Some even quoted an upper limit of 120 years based on accelerated aging tests! That sure is a long time, isn't it? But will CD-Rs really last that long?"
According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades.
According to their marketing dept., rather.
I've experienced this myself lately with a bunch of disks that were now useless. It was cheaper off brand disks that failed. The irony is at the time I got them, they were the ONLY disks I could get to work on my CD player.
So far I've had no failure with CD-R's from Sony, TDK etc... Which were the disks my CD player simply would NOT play.
i have entire 1995 to 1998 CD-R spindle's and all 400 of them still function just fine. i recently had to run trough all 400 of them, and had zero read errors. i guess my discs are possessed by some magical force, or this is just bogus.
120yers, lets start with archive rated CD-R, and use a decent recorder with a tray. Then write according to the orange book specifications.
Léa Gris
I've had CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that I burned over a decade ago still read fine. However, those disks were verified burns where I immmediately read back the data with Nero to make sure they were ok.
There was a time when I didn't do verified burns. Those disks have a ridiculously high failure rate, but I'm betting they were bad burns in the first place. With most media I get close to a 10% failure rate on verifying the burns.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs.
Though I'm not convinced many consumer hard drives have shelf lives on the same order as the optical media that some of us are backing up to. Add to that the fact that hard drive interfaces do change fairly often (some of us still have systems in the transitional period between IDE and SATA), and you could have potentially more irritating problems if you were to back up to hard drives instead.
I suspect for paranoid user it may be more cost effective to backup multiple times to CD-R rather than to a hard drive. And on top of that, if one CD of your backup set goes, you are only out 700 MB or so. If you have a series of backups on a single 100+ GB hard drive, and it fails, you may be out everything that was on that drive.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, whatever, the burning process might have some anomalies not picked up immediate, the media is low quality, or (more likely) the laws of physics erode away at the data. This is not secret or new information, it's been known for a long time. Granted that most of my collection now has a high amount of data loss (and I've encountered several instances with corrupt data... not all that I really care about, although sometimes I do work at recovering any damage I might find, especially if it's possible to verify "corrected" files with known good checksums, or infer the original contents (with, for example, text files)), since about 2005 or 2006, I've always made recovery (http://parchive.sf.net/) discs to maintain the maximal possibility of recovering data in the future. It effectively halves the capacity of my spindles (eg, in a 100 stack, I might use 50~60 for actual files and the rest for recovery files), but it's worth it; I've already encountered quite a few cases of bad media from after the time I started making parity files, and boy am I glad for it!
Digital media are not permanent and who cares. Make more digital copies. Repeat.
I would say take the Rosetta Stone approach.
Good advice. I save three word 97 copies of all my documents. One in English, one in classical Greek, and one in in hieroglyphics.
dvdisaster is what I use now...both on CDs and DVDs (it also supports dual-layer)
think of it as a way to embed par2 (parity) onto a disc (it requires an ISO image that you create in your favorite authoring software, then after it's done embedding the parity in it, you can burn it)
alternately, you can create a separate recovery data which you can store on backup tapes or hard drives or on another disc, etc.
"Studies" like this are useless if they don't include information from the codes off the CD's (not the label on the box!) as to who the manufacturer is.
Get the Taiyo Yuden and MAM-A Gold blanks and you won't have issues like this.
Also please read the Wikipedia article on CD-ROMs, and expecially the references. You WILL end up with better burns if you do.
Depends what you mean by "big enough", other than things that are redundantly backed up (my music and photos are on several MP3 players/iPods along with various flash drives, SD and other memory cards while other files are on one of my e-mail accounts) anything that really -has- to be backed up can fit easily in a CD-R. Sure, that won't get me every single movie I've ripped from DVD into a different format, sure its not going to get me all my applications settings, sure it probably wouldn't hold the 20 or so half-coded projects I've started but never finished. But all those are really pointless. I mean, sure, it would be a pain to re-rip all those DVDs, but over half of them I don't think I've ever really watched on my computer save for making sure the rip was done correctly, despite how I would like to finish my half-coded FPS written in python, I doubt I ever would. Other than a few financial documents, everything else is simply trivial.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There's error correction on CDs, the problem is that a 'bad' burner could produce a disk which is correctable to the proper data, but later on as some material degrades, will become unreadable, as opposed to simply requiring some error correction.
There used to be some brands that the firmware would show stats of that, however there haven't for a number of years, barring a few firmware hacks. (Amusing having to hack the firmware to get information that used to be semi-common.)
I recently tried reading a bunch of audio CD-Rs burned between 2003 to 2007. I used Exact Audio Copy on a Toshiba drive. I was able to get error-free reads from about half the disks recorded in 2003; about 3/4 of the ones from 2004, and from all the ones recorded after that. On the early ones that worked, sometimes EAC took a couple of hours to do the reads, which means it was doing a lot of retries. On the later ones, the transfers were mostly just a few minutes. On the ones that reported less than 100%, sometimes EAC spent 50-60 hours trying.
For the disks that I could not get 100% reads on from the Toshiba drive, I tried them in several other computers using a variety of programs. Mostly I was not able to get results as good as EAC on the Toshiba drive. I tried two Mac Mini's using Max and an old Mac G3 using cdparanoia from the command line, and got lots of failures. Then I tried Max on my MacBook and they all read perfectly. Go figure.
I theorize that one reason the disks had errors was that they were labeled using a Sharpie. According to the NIST report on CD-R failures (nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/109/5/j95sla.pdf), this is a really, really bad idea. Since I read that report, I've been adamant about using only water-based markers on CDs and DVDs.
CD-Rs design is very flawed in that the recording layer is near the surface as opposed to being well protected in the middle, as it is in DVD-Rs.
I've had numerous CD-Rs that were well cared for get flaky after a year or so; data is usually still there, but requires use of various recovery tools.
DVD-Rs have been very reliable in comparison - never had a problem.
With that said, what I do for archival data is use two different brands of DVD-R *plus*, when possible, save two, sometimes even three, duplicate copies of the data on the same DVD-R. That way I have two to as many as six copies of the data, often including dups on the same DVD-R allowing for faster, more convenient recovery.
Ron
...is the venerable 5.25" floppy disk, circa pre-1985. My Apple // disks from that time are still readable. It takes rather a long time to back up my 1TB WD "Green" HD onto the Apple //GS I have networked to my main machine, but hey, backups are important! :)
I burn thousands of CDs and DVDs per week and here are some tips
- use pro grade media from Taiyo Yuden (Made in Japan) or Falcon (Made in UAE). Verbatim still makes some good media but you have to know what to look for (Datalife Plus) because they also buy cheap media and rebrand it.
- burn cd-r at 16 or 24x. 32x is ok for short-term use. Even the best discs will fail if you burn at maximum speed.
- burn dvd-r at 8x
- if you must burn dvd-r at 16x, test your quality regularly for signs of failure.
how to test the quality:
- Plextor made good drives bundled with Plextools testing software but they are no longer making their own drives. For a replacement to Plextools, see Opti Drive Control at cdspeed2000.com
I save mine in Arial, Times New Roman and Wingdings.
Is this sufficient?
Punched cards or punched tape using something stronger than ordinary paper is very good for long-term storage. In ideal conditions it can last millennia.
If that's not good enough, non-organic inks on cave walls and cut indentations in stone can last even longer if protected.
OT: "It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment" WTF? When did /. start limiting you to 1 comment every 4 minutes?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I used-to make 2 CDs of every ISO, until I figured out how best to utilize PAR2.
PAR2 calculates parity information on a set of files, and writes out a file which can be used in the event that any of the files is damaged. This is quite similar to RAID-5, but PAR2 is more robust, and works on any files, not just equally sized hard drives.
Though it's no help on DVDs, CDs work GREAT with PAR2, because of their two different methods of recording. Mode 1, as all regular files are stored, reduces the amount of space available by about 12.5%, using that space for additional error correction data. Audio CDs, and Video CDs, where a single bit error isn't nearly as critical, are recorded in Mode 2, with substantially reduced error correction, but about 100MBs more usable space available.
PAR2 is similarly resilient to errors, so it can safely be used with Mode 2. This allows much more space for the parity information, and the opportunity to be safe against, and correct, respectively more damage to a disk.
Specifically, I recomend a 4-disk parity set. You fill 3 CDs full of data, and tell PAR2 to calculate 37% recovery data on those files. The first 33.334% allows you to RECOVER THE DATA FROM ONE COMPLETELY LOST CD, no matter which of the 3 it is. That still leaves you with a margin of 3.667%, so those two CDs you DO have, can have a few bad sectors as well, and all the data from the lost CD, as well as undamaged versions of the files on the two lightly damaged CDs can be recovered. Alternatively, if you DON'T lose an entire CD, all three (4 actually) CDs can have numerous bad sectors, in any distribution, up to a total of 37% of all the discs, and pristine data can still be recovered.
The method to do all this is quite simple. Just run the par2create command, telling it to create 37% recovery information. Then take the resulting BASENAME.Par2+??????? file, and create a CUE file, describing a CD with a single track across the whole CD, with the PAR2 file as the supposed audio data. eg.:
Now, any CD recording software that understands CUE files will happily record this to disc. On Unix systems, you can choose cdrecord, or cdrdao.
Now, like regular audio CDs and Video CDs, you can't just use or copy this data off the disc like a normal file on a CD. There are programs for converting VCDs into regular files, something like dat2mpeg, but I prefer a more generalized tool that can do the job:
mplayer vcd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile par2.bin
You'll note that checksums of the file and the data on disk don't quite match... This is because, in mode2, data MUST be padded to the block size. PAR2 files are fine with it, and the padding is silently discarded.
Something like DD_RESCUE to copy the (normal) files off the other CDs, in the event of damage, is probably necessary as well. Then, once you've got 3CDs worth of data (eg. 700MB CDs x 3 = 2100MBytes) you can run par2recover and all with be repaired, like magic.
The only footnote being that calculating the parity information isn't fast, so this method is probably slower than just recording 2 copies of every CD. Also, if you lose more than 37% of the data across all the discs, the error-free originals can't be recovered. However, I consider it more reliable than duplicate discs, if only because the odds of an error on the same sector of two discs (or one disc lost, and the backup with a few errors), seems more likely than 37% of the discs being damaged beyond hope. And as an added bonus, you save 1/3rd on your CD-R purchases.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I go and reinstall windows on my dad's machine. I use an nLited burnt CD I made(HP made CD) and it won't even boot. Tried a linux recovery CD(same maker of CD), would not boot. Somehow, out of the 6 tries I was able to get the XP install CD to boot. It did. Failed about halfway, asking for the file "ASMS", which didn't exist(but a folder did).
So, bad Cd? I fire up a virtual machine, and install XP in the machine and it works flawlessly.
I go back to my dad's machine & eventually try my legit store-bought XP install CD, and it continued to install. I burn a CD of my dad's backed up data(again, an HP cd), and it reads just fine on my machine I burned it from, won't read at all on my dad's system.
Wow, I'm lucky.
HD storage is incredibly cheap and like others have pointed out, we've only had 3 major interface changes in the past 20 years.
I can't read anything from my first personal 10 MB HD, either, but that never mattered. Each upgrade, transferring that to a new set of drives was trivial. I still have emails I wrote 10 years ago, not because I can read the drives. Those drives have little to no utility to me as a storage medium. I have that data because it was a 250MB HD and that takes up less space on my NAS than a single 1080p movie trailer.
In five year's time, I'm not going to be interested in reading the HDs I have now because they'll have long been transferred to the 50TB NAS type solution I'll have then.
cool dry place w/ no sunlight / UV. get a large CD storage folder (they usually have em for holding 500 or so disks and leave it in a drawer.
see here : http://www.supermediastore.com/cd-dvd-wallet-wallets-cd-holders-cd-storages-organizer-epv-520.html
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Just broadcast your illegal movies and ugly photos toward a large, massive body so that the signals intersect with the earth again later after traveling along space-time geodesics. You can use Sagittarius A* (black hole at the center of the galaxy) for this, but you have to remember to be there to record your 50,000 year old backup once it arrives, because it's not like the hole is your bitch.
I'm the kind of person who usually does a fair amount of research before he leaps, and so when I first started burning CD-Rs, I did everything more or less by the book. I used quality media (Mitsui and Taiyo Yuden), quality burners (Plextor), always verified my burns, and never used any crazy high speeds. My CD-Rs have held up well in many aspects, and I've only had a few physically intact discs that went bad for no apparent reason (most of which are from what may have been a problem batch of Mitsui Silvers, burned around 2000/2001).
But no one really made it clear how physically fragile the damn things were, especially in comparison to pressed silver CDs. I kept my backups in a booklet-style binder. Yes, I know that's considered less than ideal, but these discs weren't burned solely for archival purposes -- I needed to be able to page through them efficiently. Most of them were taken out and used every so often -- say, four times a year on average, sometimes more -- and never knowingly abused.
Over time, the foil on quite a few of them started to flake off. Unbranded Taiyo Yudens, which are so often acclaimed, seem to be the most vulnerable -- I've had quite a few that developed holes in the foil, especially near the edge. It's a shame, because the discs read beautifully otherwise, and seem to ace most media tests. But the foil seems all too easy to damage.
(I've also lost a handful of Mitsui Silvers that way, whereas Mitsui Golds seem to have a more robust armoring on top, as do some of the 2nd tier discs I've tried -- Sony, Maxell, TDK, Memorex. Meanwhile, I've seen no evident physical damage to my DVD-Rs so far; fingers crossed.)
30 years ago I punched my programs on "archival quality" punch cards. They weren't like regular cardboard cards, they had a higher rag content that would assure they'd retain their shape longer with less chance of bending.
John
I found that burning CD-RWs twice (quick delete and then burn again identically with bit for bit) all but wiped out problems I'd had with rewritables.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
(Throw a coin. If it's heads, read the P.S. first. Lucky you.)
I remember a large-scale test with pretty much all CD-Rs and CD-RWs on the market back in (around) 2000 (I think).
They used a climate chamber with all the effects of nature, amplified so much, that they could simulate 10 years of normal daylight, humidity, etc.
The blue and green materials died first. (I think blue was much worse than green, but only for some models.) After an average of 3-4 years! The original golden material survived better, but not much.
Only CD-RWs could even come close to 20 years, because they had to be manufactured better, and use other materials.
I also remember that our very first CD-Rs, burned on a huge rented SCSI burner, at 13 DM a piece, were unreadable right when we took them out of the archive one year later. Which was still better than those 50% who never survived the first burning at all.
Everyone around me always tells me that his old CD-Rs still work, and things like that. And they do not take me seriously when I tell them of the low life-span.
But usually, they do not even take them out to try them. And if they do, they look at the directory index, and think that means that all data is OK. And even than sometimes fails.
Also, they rarely can find CD-Rs, old enough to prove me right on the spot.
But if you take those discs, transfer everything and all its data to the hard disk, and then look at what you get, usually what you're left with, looks like a shattered mirror or the output of a random number generator.
P.S.: Sorry, just watched the Watchmen again (is that a pun?), and inadvertently wrote the whole comment in Rohrschach's journal voice.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It seems to me that burn speed would have a large influence on this. Has anyone ever seen a study comparing real world lifespans of discs burnt at different speeds?
I've often wondered if there'd be a market for hard drives especially designed for long-term archiving.
They'd be slow-spinning, with slow transfer rates, and hold less data per square centimeter of disk surface, for the extra magnetic integrity. Some archivists wouldn't mind if they were very large, too, or even very heavy. They could be shelved in a "slow cloud" backup warehouse. They'd be "set and forget" - used once to record the data, then shelved and hopefully never used again, and only when a slow data restoration would be no hardship.
Surely there's a niche market for an odd device with specs that emphasize duration of storage, rather than the usual "faster, smaller" attributes. Until those long-awaited chalcedony drives arrive, it seems there's a niche opportunity here for a low-volume, high-margin manufacturer.
Backups are not archives. Backups are a copy of working state, such that you can restore working state if it is lost or corrupted, partially or totally.
Optical media is poorly suited to backups, for a number of reasons. Optical media backups are:
In all those cases, hard drive backups are a win. External hard drives (I won't consider internal here, but the same generally applies) are easily automated, requiring no operator intervention. External hard drives can be copied to new hard drives easily - plug in the second drive, drag and drop all files, and walk away. Hard drive backups are easily searched (assuming good software, I'll just assume you have Time Machine or equivalent). Hard drive management interfaces can report disk failures or sector entropy as soon as it happens (and external enclosures offer RAID-1 at an affordable price point now).
If you lose your backup drive(s), it's not a big deal: get a new drive, do a backup straight away. You'll have lost your recent history, which means you may be out of luck if you accidentally deleted a file yesterday, but your current data's integrity is preserved.
Archiving is a different matter. If the goal is to have highly reliable archives, again, I think hard drives offer many advantages over optical media -- do the archival work on the working system, thus letting the entire archive be backed up. Storage space is going to be your limiting factor, but hard links or delta storage can help for regular archival intervals with small deltas (eg, your SCCM repository is an archive using delta storage, you back up the repository itself, not each revision). If the goal is to have many archives, with less emphasis on reliability, optical media is probably the winner: you don't need to verify the discs regularly since individual reliability is not a key metric, and you can churn out a lot of archival entries cheaply this way. If you have massive storage requirements and massive reliability requirements, you're not doing it on a home user budget, unfortunately.
I can talk about enterprise-class storage and backup solutions if you like, running into the hundreds of thousands in capex, millions in aggregate in opex, but it might interest you to know that despite all this money thrown around on backup systems, we still run cheap USB drives attached to laptops and desktops, because it gets a user back up and running in their original configuration in half a day if their system fails and needs replacing (and frankly, I don't want to waste our enterprise storage on terabytes of staff music and photo libraries :-)
Back in the earlier days of CDR, a "high speed recorder" was recording at a whopping 4x or so. As drive recording speeds increased, the CDRs rated for those higher speeds had to become more responsive to the laser hitting it for a shorter period of time. How do you accomplish that? One big way was spreading the dye out in a thinner layer. That's likely to have a negative effect on longevity.
is what it takes to get the maximum lifespan from your archives. This means not buying the cheapest shit you can for your important data. Instead the only one who meets the entire specification is Verbatim media. Sure it's not the cheapest when it comes to media but in the long run, it's certainly cheaper then buying whatever happens to be on sale at best buy and if your data is important, then spend the extra money for quality media, which is exactly what Verbatim is.
In my normal useage, I now only buy Verbatim for anything that I need to ensure is archived for any length of time. Otherwise for a quick and dirty backup, I'm now using an external drive then burned to Verbatim media for longterm storage. For those cheap and rapidly changing ISO images, the cheap disks are sufficient (things like FC/Ubunta/Kubunta and other Linux Distro's) In fact, I've found that buying Verbatim Rewritable media has become the cheapest solution for the many test images I burn due to the quality of the material. I'm still operating on my first batch of 10 Verbatim DVD/RW disks (now pushing 5 yrs) because they've lasted through so many rewrite cycles. I've also used cheap disks and the damn things have gone to crap in just a few months.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Back in 1994 or 1995, a whole bunch of us got into the PlayStation mod chip scene which naturally included a need to make burned game copies. This was right at the advent of home CD burning and burner drives were hundreds of dollars and ran at 1x or maybe 2x and were usually SCSI. It was FAR from the drop-and-go way we do disc burning now. Aside from getting it to work at all, another major issue we had was finding affordable blank media. $5-10 a disc was not uncommon, and failed burns were also not uncommon: these were the days of 1mb buffers and Windows 95 and klunky software that barely worked. We didn't have Nero or anything like drives with underrun protection. You could coaster a ton of media easy because the wind was blowing the wrong way, it seemed. So we were always looking for a way to get media cheap. Sam's Club came to the rescue with 10-packs of Verbatim CD-Rs for $10. A buck a disk. These days, that's a ripoff. In THOSE days, however, this was practically a steal. And the discs mostly burned fine and the PSX liked them. A perfect match. All the PSX game copy people jumped into Verbatim. I remember one friend who had 5 100-disc binders of copies and those were just the ones he kept. Another guy had bookcases full of discs in jewel boxes. Almost all Verbatim. Dozens of us locally went for that brand like crazy. We thought we had it made. This went on for a year or so before the problems started. Also, we ran out of good PSX games to trade at the same time. But we still had older good games. But problems happened. Previously known-good discs started going bad. Visually, we saw pits and spots appearing that looked kinda like craters or maybe mold. Sometimes spots, sometimes half a disc at a time. The problem was flaws in the dyes. Other discs delaminated -the cyan data layer actually flaked off the polycarbonate. Mostly we saw the rot and it hit discs stored in binders, in the original jewel boxes or not ever burned. It didn't matter how the discs were stored. It didn't matter how they were recorded or if they were ever played or how long they were played. Eventually nearly 90% of the Verbatim discs failed. The other 10% escaped only because we quit looking out of disgust. In short, several thousand game copies got wiped out by this failing media. Now there's the moral argument that what we were doing was wrong and we got punished in a way and that could be kinda acceptable if it was only game copies that died. But we also lost other fully legitimate burns. The product made no distinction. The product was crap. Why, who knows. I do know I won't ever use Verbatim for anything at this point. There's no trust or faith. I have used other brands of media all along and most of those from the same era are still good to go. TDK, 3M, Memorex, Sony, even some CompUSA-branded media still works fine. Cheap computer flea market media sucked too. Go figure. Mostly, bad media was rare unless you hit a product that was just inherently worse than another. Lessons were learned from this: don't trust media for permanent storage. A CD-R that dies is 640 or 700MB down the drain. Stings but you go on. A failed DVD is 4.5GB in the trash. Ouch. That hurts a lot more. Worse for DVD DL. That brings us to BluRay. 50GB a disc? I am not trusting THAT ever. And the one beyond BD that offers 500GB? No freaking way. ONE dead disc should not wipe out 50 or 500GB of data. Disc burning is not stable and secure and reliable enough to trust at that level and we as users and consumers should refuse to accept it. What else can we do? I don't know. But clearly burned media is not the answer.
Sig for hire.
No, you need a copy in Comic Sans as well so that the people who try to decode it in the future have a wide corpus of works with which to compare it.
That CDs/DVDs won't last forever was a given. That we relied on them is simply due to us considering the promised 10 years "long". Other media last longer. But is there something that will last forever?
Let's be honest here. Imagine our civilisation fails for some reason. And in a millenium or two, archeologists want to find out how we lived. What will they find? Well, of course they will find a lot of plastic bags and maybe a few cans, a couple glass bottles and some foundations of houses and churches. But anything we wrote? Any data we collected? Art? Anything at all that shows we were literate?
Aside of grave stones?
It's amazing that in almost 10 millenia of culture we didn't manage to invent anything but stone tablets to record information "forever". Nothing else will survive. Digital data fails before a century. Current paper won't survive for more than a few centuries, even if stored properly.
It's a curious mind experiment to ponder what would the average archeologist think of us if he finds some of our artifacts with no further data. Considering how most artefacts that make no immediate sense are classified as "religious" or "cultural", my guess is that we'll be considered a lot more religious than we really are, and that Pepsi is our god, and the Pepsi cultists were in heated battle with those that worship the Mountain Dew.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As DJ I used to store all my vinyl on CD as backup. I've once used my cd's for over a year in hard-dj-labor and most of them did survive although I might add:
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I can say that CD-Rs are pretty unreliable past about 5 years. I recently tried to open some old graphics files from our CD-R archives at work, and it didn't go so well.
Everything I was trying to open recently was about 7 years old, and about half the discs wouldn't even read, or would throw errors when I tried to actually copy anything off them.
It also opened up the issue of file formats...what the hell am I going to do with an Aldus Pagemaker file from 2001? Nothing in Adobe CS3 had any idea what to do with it. I think that's what that extension was, anyway. Archiving photos and videos is pretty safe as far as file formats go. A BMP is crappy and gigantic next to a TIFF or PNG, but you can still open it.
Proprietary layout formats though...they get old faster than cheese in a hot car.
Porquoi?