MoLinKo wrote:
I first remember the cd burners coming around in 99. It's 2006, shouldn't we have heard about this by now?
Well some of us already had!
Besides which - look how long magnetic tape, discs, cylinders and other more old-fashioned forms of data
storage have lasted. Around twenty years or even more in many cases. Of course in many of those cases the quality has degraded and has to be restored and enhanced, but the original material is at least accessible.
Not to mention paper and parchment lasting anything from a couple of decades to several centuries...! So put against that, having CDs around that might date from 1999 is hardly an indication of real reliability.
The question is, will CDs (and DVDs and other forms of
storage) last that long, both in terms of the data integrity, and in terms of having the hardware that is backward-compatible enough to read them? Almost certainly not.
Of course, as time goes by and technology develops,
storage systems become more reliable and recopying large amounts of data is a lot less tedious and difficult that it used to be, but on the flip-side of that, a great deal more vital information is stored and processed electronically than ever before and increasingly, much of it is held in electronic form
only, thus increasing the negative impact that could be caused in the event that the data is lost.