February 08, 2005

• I guess one obvious question, now that CD-Rs have been on the market for ten years now, is whether any of you have had any problems reading back your old discs. What about old CD-ROMs? I haven't seen any problems yet, but I rarely dig in any discs dated before 1998.
• Well in keeping ith the inexorable march of technology, you have to figure that even if your CDs/DVDs are fine 70 years from now, I doubt you'll be able to find a computer or a CD/DVD player to read them on... (We just found a whole bunch of SyQuest discs... no working player to be found)
• My question is, which brands are better?
• Well, Weezel, it does vary with the burners... I know LaCie recommends Verbatim CDs/DVDs ith their burners, but I've been using Memorexes for about year without issue. For my archival stuff I'm on a annual re-burn, so I feel comfortable using the bargain basement stuff, I also keep a cloned HD, and full incremental backup on AIT tapes... (wow.. I'm fucking paranoid...) I have heard through the grapevine that Sony was best, but that might be just because they're one of the more pricier brands off the shelf... The easiest thing to do is to check with your burner manufacturer to see which brand they recommend the strongest...(and hope they don't just have some cushy crossover deal with the CD/DVD manufacturer)
• Archive tape is probably your best bet, in some ways. 9 track has outlasted many a competing form of media, although is almost dead. DAT will be around a long time. Ongoing shifts from hard drive to hard drive, as well. Why keep stuff off-line when you can just bbigger drives and shift data there?
• If my cds are working fifty years from now, I doubt that I will still want to listen to the Little River Band's Greatest Hits anymore, so it won't really matter.
• Hard disks are the best archive format for personal use. (Magnetic tape is still king for most professional use - regular back ups of huge databases.) Hard drives are cheap (and getting cheaper. They are almost at parity with DVD-Rs MB/$) and much more convenient to back up to than CD-Rs or DVD-Rs. They are faster and have higher capacity, and back-ups can be easily automated. They are also much more robust. Sitting on a shelf, the data on a hard disk will basically stay there forever - even under extreme temperature and humidity variations that would ruin a DVD or magnetic tape. As long as it isn't subjected to a strong impart or a very strong magnetic field, your data will be there when you need it. Add to that the fact that hard disks have much better error correction than CDs or DVDs. Modern HDs also support hardware monitoring that can warn you if the drive starts to fail, and can correct for physical errors on the disk. Note that you do not want to keep your back up drives connected and spinning all the time. This lowers the life expectancy increases the risk of failure. Get an external USB 2.0 or Firewire enclosure. Pop a HD into it when it's time to back up, then remove the drive and stick it somewhere safe.
• Good points all around. I think I will have to consider the HD route for a lot of the archival that I do for my business (right now it's DVD-R with backups on CD-R).
• well.fuck.me. The problem is, I don't buy HDD's just to store things, I actually use them. And we all know that HDD's have a 100% failure rate. Not to mention we'll all be RE-replacing our vinyl album collections. for the second time. Hello, RIAA? Hi. Yes, DIRL please! *uses spankin' new catchphrase from yesterday's thread*
• Verbatim's actually have a pretty bad rep. Same with Memorex. If they're working for you, great, but I wouldn't count on them long term. Most of the other brand names such as Sony, Ricoh and 3M are generally considered reasonably safe for a few months to a year of reliability. Taiyo Yuden and MAM-A are considered amongst the best, expected to last years, and possibly decades. If you're looking for serious quality, you can also still order MAM-A 'Golds' through better CDR suppliers. These are estimated to last a century, though they're about $10 more for a 50 pack. If it's not labelled Taiyo or MAMA, just don't expect much from them. There's very little reliability in other brand names or manufacturing. Many brands are happy to source their discs from whoever has the lowest price that month, or license their brand to anyone who wants to slap it on a spindle. There are also many CDR factories making cheap substandard discs, using sloppy manufacturing or substandard sealants that lead to discs degrading in weeks or even days. Personally, I keep a spindle of MAMAs around for the stuff I care about, and a spindle of a cheaper brand for the throw-aways. The cheaper brand I choose based on the rec of a local CDR distributor, whose selection varies from month to month. If he's not getting any returns, the brand is considered reasonably reliable.
• As a writer I am very paranoid about backup. I use an external HD but also upload everything to the server @ my ISP. My reasoning being a) if there is a fire/earthquake/act of God in my apartment, their server sits in another state and b) they themselves back up my data with professional equipment beyond my budget, or so I like to think...
• "I actually use them. And we all know that HDD's have a 100% failure rate." Most of my experience is with multitrack audio recording - where I've always used faster, higher quality drives. I've gone through dozens of them (probably around 50-60, actually), running them at full speed for several hours at a time in very hot computer cases, and never had single failure. The only failure I've had was on the OEM (read: cheap) system drive in my computer at work. It was used heavily every day for four years before it decided it was tired of spinning up. (Because of good back-up practices though, I didn't lose any important data.) I've also had a near failure, where S.M.A.R.T. (hard disk monitoring) told me that the syntem drive was misbehaving. I copied (ghosted) my software and OS onto a new drive without a problem, and haven't had a problem since. Of course I'm not saying that hard disk failures don't happen. I've witnessed it on other's computers and heard horror stories. I'm just saying that my experience tells me that newer drives are more reliable than older drives, that more expensive "enterprise-class" drives are more reliable than cheap OEM drives, and that you shouldn't expect the system drive you use all day to last forever. So I use separate, high-quality drives for archive purposes that sit around un-powered most of the time, and make a Ghost image of my system hard disk in case it fails. In any case, we're talking about the back-up media, not practices. If someone is really interested in protecting their data, they're gonna have to implement a good strategy involving regular back ups, a safe place to store back-up media, etc. The real point is that hard drives - used as an archive medium - are much more robust than CDs, DVDs or tape, and are nearly as cheap.
• My reasoning being a) if there is a fire/earthquake/act of God in my apartment, their server sits in another state and Off site backup is an extremely good idea for anything you really care about. Just leave a duplicate at your cottage, or your relatives, your personal office, etc. A close second in greatest loss of data, after equipment failure, is fire and theft. [my ISP] themselves back up my data with professional equipment beyond my budget, or so I like to think Uh...no, that's not likely. Most ISPs will backup only their internal systems, so they can get back up and running reasonably quickly. They're not in the backup business. If you want to backup your data using an online service, use a dedicated online data backup company like xDrive, or their many competitors. The rates are cheap, and they do employ user data backup systems (though you should always read the fine print to make sure).
• One problem with picking a media brand is that most of the brands available in stores are just that. TDK, Fuji, Memorex, et al. don't actually manufacture the media, they just slap a label on something made by another company. Two packages from the same brand, sitting right next to each other on a retail shelf, may have been manufactured in different plants. It is possible to skip the retail shell game and buy bulk unbranded media from a specific manufacturer, if you're willing to do it online, and if you're willing to buy 100 discs or more at a time. But they're actually more expensive (Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs run around US$0.30 each, for example) than the cheapies that are perpetually on sale at the local big-box PC/electronics store. More information on the topic can be found in The CD Recordable FAQ, which has a few words specifically on media longevity. All that said, though, even the shoddiest CD-Rs I burned in 2000 still read OK.
• If it is text or b&w photos, dead trees still work very well...
• Anyone got any thoughts on whether DVD-Rs are safer than CD-Rs? Bit for bit they're about as economical.
• Apparently they're pretty much made using the same processes, so the same brand recommendations and warnings apply.
• Most of the other brand names such as Sony, Ricoh and 3M are generally considered reasonably safe for a few months to a year of reliability. 3M's media business was spun off into Imation a few years ago. (Just in case you went looking for 3M discs at the store or something)
• I still have a CDR that was burned 10 years ago (1995). Haven't checked it for several years, but I'm sure it will make for a good indicator of this... (if I recall, it's Verbatim brand.)
• Late comment on this thread: HDDs are vulnerable to acts of $DEITY. I just lost 20 MB of MP3s in a lightning storm that fried an external drive that wasn't completely backed up (that was 20 MP of 60+). Most of it is stuff I can replace, and some is stuff I don't care if I replace, and I'm mostly thanking the aforesaid $DEITY that nobody was injured in the storm, which fried a lot of our equipment, but keep it in mind if you're using HDDs to back up. RAID is your friend, but so is good luck.