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RE: CD-Rs vs. Store-bought CDs (WAS: Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?)
Subject:RE: CD-Rs vs. Store-bought CDs (WAS: Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?) From:"Johnson, Tom" <TJohnson -at- starcutter -dot- com> To:"Joe Malin" <jmalin -at- tuvox -dot- com>, "Keith Hansen" <KRH -at- weiland-wfg -dot- com>, "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:47:59 -0500
-----Original Message-----
Joe Malin wrote:
> The longest-lived media I can think of is stone. That's followed (in
> rough order) by clay, leather/parchment, and old-fashioned linen-based
> paper. My guess is that "machine-readable" media first becomes unusable
> because nobody can find a device to *read* it, and that happens *long*
> before the media itself decays.
Stone has its limitations. Acid rain literally erases data from many stone monuments and grave markers. If I were going for maximum longevity, I would use etched glass or gold foil. They are both quite durable, better than stone, if you protect them from mechanical (dropping, crushing, breaking, tearing) damage. Remember, no media is indestructible is someone makes up their mind to destroy it.
> My favorite examples would be old style IBM tape and 5.25" floppy disks.
> Even if you could find a IBM 3700 tape drive or an old floppy drive,
> what would you connect it to?
Well the 5.25" floppy gets copied to a 3.5" floppy and that gets transferred to the one remaining machine with a 3.5" floppy that's on the network. Once it is on the network, it gets backed up on a regular basis. There, simple! In fact, we just did that a few months ago when we came across some archive 5.25" floppies. BTW, if you want a benchmark for that media life-expectancy, we retrieved every file, with a little work and disk recovery tools, on disks that were up 20+ years old.
> Having said this, the best thing would be to backup your backups to
> fresh, "modern" media every 2-3 years.
Good advice!
Tom
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