[mythtv-users] OT: disc life

[James L. Paul]

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On Wednesday 03 December 2003 11:19, Boyd II, Willy wrote:

> Just out of curiousity, do you use a certain brand of cd-r or dvd-r discs
> in order to maximize shelf life for those archives?  (I'm merely
> piggy-backing off your archival
> research :-)
>
> - Willy

Heh, I was talking about VHS tapes, and those are several different brands.

As for CDR brands, I don't know that my data is any more valid than anybody 
elses. I haven't lived long enough yet to experience lots of failures, 
although there is one particular Verbatim stack of 50 blueish CDRs that I 
burned over a couple months back around 2000, and not a single one of them is 
readable now. For all I know that was some interaction of my writer and those 
discs or something else weird. I'm glad I didn't use more of them.

I have a couple thousand VCDs on the old Kodak Gold 4x CDRs that are all still 
going strong. Since prices came down a couple years ago and now CDRs are 
basically free I stick to major brands like TDK. Drop me an email in 10 years 
and I'll let you know how it's going. :)

One thing I've believed from the very start for archiving CDRs, I absolutely 
will NOT use adhesive labels. I've seen what time and adhesive labels do to 
other surfaces over years as they dry out, and that's the last thing I want 
to do to that delicate top foil layer on my archive CDRs. I don't spend any 
time fondly gazing at my discs, I sure don't need pretty labels on them. A 
soft sharpie-written name of what's on the disc is all I need, and plenty off 
200-disc binders to store them all in.

I recently ran across a post somewhere on the net, wish I bookmarked it. A guy 
went through an archive of a few thousand CDRs used for automated backups at 
his company and re-verified the discs. He gave some detailed stats. All the 
discs had been recorded with automated backup software with verification 
turned on, so they were known to be good at the time of burning. A small 
number of discs had adhesive labels applied. You guessed it, those are the 
only ones that had failed. That was enough to make me feel vindicated.

As for DVDR, I have no idea. I've read that they may fail within 10 years or 
last 100 years. Since prices haven't fallen enough to suit me yet, I'm still 
buying rather generic blanks. I've had good results with ACCU 2x DVD-R 
blanks, but certainly can't vouch for their archive stability. I haven't 
burned any coasters out of about 230 with my Sony DRU500AX, and all the ones 
I've burned still work. It's barely been more than a year though since I 
started, so who knows?
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