[HBR] Fw: HBR data CDs and labels

[Martin Marris]

For what it's worth. 

About 10 years ago my late father burned DVDs of about 100 hours of home movies and gave a set to each of his children. They have labels printed onto them -- I am not sure how he did this. They don't look like "stick-on" labels, it's almost like he actually ran the DVDs through his printer.

Ten years later, these DVDs are essentially useless -- I cannot get them to play back on any device, whether a PC or a dedicated player. However, my dad was prescient in that he also gave me a copy of all of those DVDs on a portable hard disk, and those copies are fine (and I have since made copies of the copies, onto yet another hard disk).

I have no idea whether the labels are the issue. Right from the beginning, these DVDs were "flakey" -- they would work on some DVD players, but not others. Even DVD players that were advertised as able to play back "home-burned" DVDs wouldn't necessarily play back these disks.

After more than two decades' worth of experience with burnable CDs and then burnable DVDs, I must say that I don’t trust them. For our business data we use multiply redundant hard disks, and for archival storage we used, for a long time, magneto-optical (MO) disks -- I have about 300 of those and only one of them has ever failed, but nowadays it looks like they are only used by the medical data industry.

Nowadays I consider home-burnable CD/DVD media to be "ephemeral" storage. This does *not* apply to commercially produced audio CDs and DVDs: I have never had a failure with those, unless they were defective right from the word go (very rare, but it happens; I have a couple of commercial audio CDs that "skip").

73,

Martin, KB1WSY