CDR For long term use?????

[Thmsshaun]

Not so sure anymore.

Whats peoples experience? But I would say be careful.

 

[scotth_uk]

Sad. :-(

One of the problems is that low quality discs have saturated the market to the point where you can no longer identify the good quality discs!

 

[Thmsshaun]

I think the Disc was from Argos and may be around 5 years old.

Even so I am amazed it has happened. What are the best brands?

 

[andy_k]

no such thing as a "best brand". Dire warnings have ben around for years now about the long term storage of any data using CDs. They might last two years they may last ten but sooner or later it's likely that the odd one will fail.

I've got three or four music CDs in which the silvering has tarnished and they no longer play.

An article I read suggested backing up your back-ups and replacing the storage medium every three years for CD and 5 years for DAT tape

Andy

 

[Thmsshaun]

Thats worrying as I have music on some of these CD's that must be approaching 6-7?? Years old now. Think I will get them backed up.

 

[Satch]

It varies, This explains the criteria for choosing archive quality media:

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/delivering/cdr-dvdr.html

You get what you pay for and in the not too distant future going to be misery as people find that they have a mounting number of unreadable CDR's etc. Key bit from above link:

.......even if all 'best practice' is used when creating and storing the CD-R discs, they should be migrated well within their expected lifetime. For CD-R/DVD-R current best practice suggests this should be between 2 and 5 years.

 

[bitonw]

Keep them out of the light.

 

[BTB 500]

External hard drives get bigger and cheaper by the day, I'm archiving all my images etc. to those now rather than CDs.

 

[andy_k]

hmmm, not sure that's going to stand up to close scrutiny Bill. Hard drives have a shorter working life than CDs and it's got a load of moving parts as well as being a magnetic storage medium.

CDRs and DVDs still represent the best way to back things up - just makie sure you do everything twice and rotate your storage media

Andy

 

[BTB 500]

hmmm, not sure that's going to stand up to close scrutiny Bill. Hard drives have a shorter working life than CDs and it's got a load of moving parts as well as being a magnetic storage medium.

CDRs and DVDs still represent the best way to back things up - just makie sure you do everything twice and rotate your storage media

Andy

I always have 2 copies of my archived files, on different disk drives. I'll take copying everything from one external drive to another any time, compared to copying loads of CDs or DVDs one by one onto new media every few years!

 

[scotth_uk]

I had cause to look at the MTBF figures for drives recently, and it was interesting to see how much they've improved since I last looked.

I copy some stuff onto DVD and CD for convenience, and have multiple drive copies for backup. About to invest in a NAS RAID device for LAN storage.

 

[BTB 500]

I still occasionally burn stuff to CD if I need to send large files to someone who doesn't have broadband. For casual transport of files etc. I use a USB 2.0 solid state 'flash drive' - think I paid about £15 for my 1 GB, but you can get 2 GB for £18 now (Samsung).

 

[Spinal]

I have had this problem too... That said, about 3 years ago, I switched to using black-bottomed CD-Rs. I've tried 4 brands (buying ridiculously large quantities every time I found any); and none of the 4 have given me any issues other than those I left in the car without a case and as a result got badly scratched.

IMO, they may be harder to come by, but they are definetly worth the effort!

I still occasionally burn stuff to CD if I need to send large files to someone who doesn't have broadband. For casual transport of files etc. I use a USB 2.0 solid state 'flash drive' - think I paid about £15 for my 1 GB, but you can get 2 GB for £18 now (Samsung).

Solid state flash drives have a limited number of write operations you can do before they give up. Windows Vista will use flash drives as extra ram if needed, which has raised concerns about reaching the "death limit" of these drives...

Michele

p.s. by black bottomed, I meana disks that had a black shiny burnable surface, not a black printable surface

 

[masqueraid]

I think the Disc was from Argos and may be around 5 years old

Yes Vivastar were sold in bulk by Argos on spindles of 25 - 100 and were at the bottom end of the quality market. As already said the principle of you get what you pay for applies, any burnable media is by definition light and temperature sensitive so keep your important disks in dark places.

Worth making duplicate sets of your vital stuff and checking them once every couple of years by making a copy from them. Remember that just because you can see the contents of your disk as a list doesn't mean all the individual files are OK. A disk copy will mean that every byte of data is checked.

Looks like this one has had some chemical damage though.

Never mind look at the nice imprint of 'person with digital camera' that has been left where the dye coating has been removed

 

[BTB 500]

Solid state flash drives have a limited number of write operations you can do before they give up. Windows Vista will use flash drives as extra ram if needed, which has raised concerns about reaching the "death limit" of these drives...

Yeah but ... a 1 GB Samsung USB 2.0 drive is now about £11, and I probably use mine about 4 times a year!

 

[scotth_uk]

When I first got into CD-R burning (back when it was 1x) the only discs I could get were TDK music discs. I still have some today from that time that work just fine - they were purchased in 1990.

Once burners got to around 4X, I used to get Mitsui Golds from a Japanese importer. I recall buying a couple of thousand of them over 2-3 years and can only recall a few going wrong.

Verbatims at the time were the worst discs I have ever seen. Kodaks were also quite good.