[Ti] OT Durability of DVDs

[Kynan Shook]

EVERY storage medium will degrade over time.  Among CD-Rs, the best is 
probably Mitsui, which I would expect to see maybe 100 years, assuming 
you don't abuse the CDs.
A few years ago, I went through a huge stack of floppies, reformatting 
each one to see if it had any bad blocks.  If there were bad blocks, 
the disk got tossed; once it starts going, it's not a good idea to risk 
using the disk if you care about your data.  Two thirds of the disks 
got tossed.  Now, these disks weren't under ideal conditions, but 
rather real-world conditions.  They got carried around, used, whatever. 
  But I've had far more floppies fail on me than CD-R or DVD-R discs.
Anyway, even a hard drive will eventually go bad.  You might get a 
little more time out of it if it's not plugged in, but even so it will 
eventually die, and if the controller on the drive dies 3 years from 
now and you don't find out about it for 15 more, it might be hard to 
find a new controller card to swap in to try and resurrect the drive.  
Somebody else had the best idea; keep multiple generations of backups 
if your data is that important.  I would also recommend using several 
different types of storage media; maybe MO, for example.  And, of 
course, you should keep backups in multiple locations.



Kynan Shook
kshook at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/kshook/index.html

Michael Bigley <wakinyan at fuse.net> writes:
> I once left a floppy in my shirt pocket; it went through the washer
> and dryer. The metal "protector" broke off, but I stuck the thing in
> my Mac IIci and copied the data off with no problem (Don't try this
> at home, haha). I have been contemplating putting the hundreds of
> floppies I have onto a couple of CDs, but guess that wouldn't be
> worth the time, eh? Do hard drives degrade without use?  They are so
> cheap now, perhaps a hot swap device would be the best bet on long
> term storage???