camcorderinfo.com — Chances are, somewhere in your household ? either in an attic, a closet, or bottom of a dresser drawer ? there resides the pictorial history of your family. You trust it to remain safe there. Time may slowly fade them, but photos will remain more or less in tact through the years. Your modern day video albums may not be so safe.
Sep 18, 2006 View in Crawl 4
merrebornSep 19, 2006
I burnt a bunch of... erm, "video" to (cheap) CDs back around '02. Most of those discs started having read errors within months, and half were unreadable by the end of the year. And these things mostly just sat on a spindle. It's not like they saw much action.Granted, I'm sure this is far worse than most media fares, but I'm never going to trust optical media for long-term storage, unless something changes drastically.
feyrSep 19, 2006
just to be safe, for important data i'd probably keep a third disk with parity information on it. that should ensure any damage can be recovered
bizmacSep 19, 2006
Actually, for professional, exist a technology that predicts degradation of tapes and drives assets. Some big companies are using StorSentry to get away from the "WTF I cant' read my tape anymore!!!, damn that was the backup of the email of super boss..."It will be interesting to see this technology coming to our non professional storage assets. But I don't know if people will take time to check their DVDs and tapes. For professional it is so important (less expensive) for us we don't have a lot of data on tapes and DVDs, but on disk...
kishkanSep 19, 2006
So how long does flash media last, if it's kept in a cool and dry place (if that even matters)?
mikecermSep 19, 2006
Just take all those CDs that you burnt 5-10 years ago with your precious memories, and burn them to DVDs (1/7th as many!) 5 years from now, burn all of your DVDs to Blu-Ray (or whatever ends up replacing DVD). I have bargain-basement, no-name CD-Rs that I burnt 10 years ago (at 2X!) that still work fine today. Don't buy into the marketing hype that gold discs are better, or that the inflated price is justified, or that they sound better. The reality is that no recordable optical media has stood the test of time (outside of lab-simulations). Just make redundant copies and keep copies on hard drive when you can.
pignanelliSep 21, 2006
That's a great idea - nitrogen filled media storage unit.