"Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?"

by one 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  one

  "Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?" John Blau, IDG News Service Tuesday, January 10, 2006

  http://msn.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124312,00.asp?GT1=7645

  "Optical discs may not be your best bet for storing digital media long term, expert" [...] "says.Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland",

  He recommend tapes, i hate.them.

  WT might be right, as they once mentioned, paper last and last.

  Problem is storing space and searching methods.

  HOld it... The writer failed to mention what might be the solution from the same company, ibm, nanotechnology.

  "millipede" is coming

  or similar technology,

  in a piece of "plastic" the size of a finger nail you can store the equivalente to 25 million text pages

  .
• 

  G Money

  But magnetic fields erase tapes and discs and not cds. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
• 

  FaithfulDoubter

  Hrm, I don't know how much I trust this "expert". He seems to be in the minority about 'tapes' being good. Tapes DO degrade over time, and digital tapes have arguably even more problems, ESPECIALLY if you use them often. (Stretching the tape often results in data loss and degredation.) I wouldn't trust tapes or CD-Rs to do real archival for much. (I'd lay good money that those people using tape for archival are using it purely because of capacity issues, NOT longevity...) That said, there are CD-Rs, and then there are CD-Rs... Some claim to have 100 year life-spans, and I know that I have several 7+ year old CD-Rs still good. The question is really how well you treat them and store them. If you store them at room temperature, out of the sunlight, in a CD-Bible or jewel case, I don't see having many trouble. And does it really take that much effort to reburn important CDs, or better yet store them on a nice network server....

  Next thing you know, I'll be hearing about people storing things on floppy again because CD-Rs are so unrelaiable...
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  drew sagan

  I've had burned cds that have lasted years. From personal expierance I can say I just don't buy it.
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  Leolaia

  It's certainly true, if you buy the cheap CD-Rs. I did, and burned lots of CDs in 1999. Last year I discovered that the dye in many of them had faded, a few are now almost transparent. And these weren't exactly lying out in the sun. Many were in closed containers. Most looked normal, but couldn't play any more.
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  Nosferatu

  CD-Rs CAN have a short life span, given bad storage conditions. I kept CD-Rs of MP3s in my truck for the past three years. They're going for shit because of bad storage conditions. The "recording" surface (that silver stuff on the top of the CD) is separating from the plastic.

  I guess only time will tell how reliable they can be. The most reliable storage mediums thus far have been vinyl records and wire recordings. Some formulas of magnetic tape also hold up quite well. Paper backed magnetic tape (made in the late 1940s) surprisingly holds up very well.

  Magnetic tapes that do not hold up well are the ones with acetate backing (made in the 1950s through the mid 1960s) and some formulas made in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They develope things such as "sticky tape syndrome", flaking oxide, and flaking lubricant. Baking them often helps restore them temporarily.

  I've been doing a lot of magnetic tape archiving as of late, so I had to learn much about it. I've been transferring it all onto CD-R. In my experience with CDs, they're not going to go for shit if stored properly. Once I see a CD-R start falling apart from normal storage conditions, then I will worry.
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  Leolaia

  Well, I kept my CDs in a CD album inside my entertainment center cabinet, where they should have been cool and out of light (and they weren't particularly often used). And yet, they have been ruined.
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  Terry

  Do.............*(fill in the blank)*.....have a short life span?

  Paper is pretty fargile (theoretically) and yet we have writing going back....back....back......a long way.

  Clay too........going back to B.C.E. Babylon....is still with us with thousands of pieces of information still available.

  The difference between THEORY and PRACTICE can be a very wide breach.

  I got my first Cdr around 1996 and it is ten years later without a problem.

  There are some manufacturers (in England mostly) who have had problems with bad discs.

  But, this is more a matter of quality control. Anything, even a multi-thousand dollar Mercedes can have huge problems because of quality control.

  Relax. How many of us have anything that important to preserve anyway?

  I've got LP's in my record collection going back to the early 50's that still play just fine, thank you. I play them by dragging a diamond (hardest natural substance in nature) across vinyl perturbations spinning on a rotating platter at high speed creating the kind of friction you get from Boy Scouts making a campfire.

  Theoretically---that should be destructive madness. But, in practice, it is a piece of cake.

  T.

  Terry
• 

  one

  I dont buy the suggestion from the the so called expert from IBM

  CD-R, back up has always been a concern for me.

  so, i try to keep everthing in a single hard disk,

  have a second hard disk (mirror)

  then make cd-r backup every so often,

  ...you can make copies of your CD-R once you feel they are "old"