[HBR] Fw: HBR data CDs and labels

[Mark Venter]

Hi,

CD's & DVD's have an organic compound coating. They start to deteriorate 
the minute they roll off the production line.
There are various coatings (and accordingly prices) in use, the 'best' 
is the gold coating which has a supposedly guaranteed life of 10 years.
The other coatings (silver, blue, green etc) have various lifespans but 
of course that is all subject to things like storage, humidity, exposure 
to sunlight or UV (fluorescent light) etc.

CD & DVD media is definitely NOT for long term storage. At this stage 
the ubiquitous USB disk drive is still your best bet as long as you 
treat it with care, i.e. do not bump, drop or rough handle it.

Kees - thanks for the note on the labels, I should check my CD but the 
first thing I normally do is copy everything off to hard drive as a backup.

73 - Mark
ZL3VML


On 5/01/2015 12:49 p.m., Martin Marris wrote:
> 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
>
>
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