Those back-Up files you've got stashed away might have lost all or some of it's Data! Check out this BBC Tech Page about it.

Scary, if you're like me and have a heap of Adobe stuff on disc, apart from all the DC image stuff.

Wadya think?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8711747.stm

Wiz

it is true, i thought this was common knowledge by now, you see, the special ink (the one that gets "burned" by the laser) will fade with time, the cheaper the ink treatment, the shorter its life.

This is always a thing that worries me, as storage discs are a fantastic idea but the life of them can be disappointing if you use cheaper discs.

Guess I wait for another couple of years & see how my treasured memories are holding up on disc ... in the meantime I'm hoping for the best.

People that do archiving professionally have known that for years. The problem is with home made CDs and DVDs, they were created with heat and will deteriorate with heat. If you want to keep something safe, just back it up on an external drive and keep it somewhere else than home. You should get rid of those old home made CD-ROMs, put them on a hard drive ASAP.

I've (for the last 5 years) used this method for backup: one copy on DVD (semi-temp, medium term storage), one copy on my "time machine" backup (short term backup) and one copy on my big external drive. I have a 2nd copy of the big external drive that I back up every month.

TRUE STORY: recently, I went to dig up some client stuff off a DVD from around 2004 - and half the files would NOT load up. I was lucky that an old shitty PC I have kicking around here did read the disk, eventually, and I was able to save the day. After the client left I went out and bought ANOTHER external harddrive and proceeded, over the next couple weeks, transferring ALL my DVD backups to it, as best I could.

My new policy: use DVD-R to hand a nice looking disk to clients, but I tell them to BACK UP TO HARD DRIVE as soon as they can, and not rely on the DVD for more than a few years.

I heard that years ago, and I would have thought it was obvious that most forms of back up over used and not properly maintained would degrade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyo_Yuden

$ € $ € $ €

A friend told me: they stay cool for a 100 years... and the golden 300-400 years.
That's enough I think

I agree with Michel about the external drive.

I remember talking about this a couple years ago.

I've got back up dvd's that have never been touched by human hands. I thought they were set in stone. Damn.

Cd's and Dvd's always seemed like such a rip off. Mainly because of their delicacy. I had a high end sony cd player in my car for years that left tractor marks across brand new cd's.

Discs were originally supposed to be bullet proof, flexible without breaking, scratchproof and heatproof. They were supposed to be the same quality play after play. Everything tapes and vinyl weren't. That was the way the technology was advertised. Thank sony for the crap we got instead.

As a DBA, I'll add that the technology curve also applies pressure on ensuring your data is not only archivable but retrivable on that same media years later.

Migration of backups from one media to another is a royal pain.

A usable parallel/hot-standby drive is a nice alternative.

CDs and DVDs that are manufactured are not to be confused with the crap version we can "burn" at home. The manufactured version is actually pressed and is supposed to last a very long time.

DVD RAM if its ok for the Australian Military then its fine with me

..."The Recordable Audio CD is typically somewhat more expensive than CD-R due to (a) lower volume and (b) a 3% AHRA royalty used to compensate the music industry for the making of a copy..."

seems like piracy has been taken care of but noone told us

The problem is that not even an external hard drive is a sure bet. I had loads of stuff saved on an external hard drive and all of a sudden it crashed and nothing on it could be retrieved. Now I'm more scared of saving on an external than on a dvd-R.

I always go for External HDD.
Even when the UBS or S-ATA connection fails, you can remove the enclosure, and you find a typical harddrive they use for computers or small drives for laptops, which you can read from any computer with ATA or S-ATA connectors.