archive thread - Subject: CD-R/DVD longevity

[jonni jemp]

The US National Institute of Standards and Technologies has recently
completed a guide to the care and handling of CD and DVD media:

<URL: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/ >

There are no specific product recommendations, but they do give
clear guidelines about disc types (gold CD-R, DVD-R or DVD+R) and
storage conditions (upright, cool, dark, low humidity). There's a
handy one page summary on the web:

<URL: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/disccare.html >





Fred Langa of The LangaList <URL: http://www.langa.com/ >
has addressed the issue. Excerpt from
<URL: http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-11-06.htm >:

��� How *Not* To Mess Up Stored CDRs!

��� Be careful! Even little things--including the glue on stick-on
��� labels--can ruin your CDRs.

��� That's one of the things your fellow readers and I found when we
��� went back and tested long-stored CDs. In my case, the only disks
��� that failed were those that I had covered with a glue-on paper
��� label from a print-it-yourself CD label-maker kit. Several of
��� these labeled CDs were, in fact, totally unreadable by every
��� means I tried (including special data recovery software); all
��� the data on those CDs is just plain gone. My best guess is the
��� glue on these do-it-yourself labels interacted with either the
��� foil or the dye, rendering the CDs useless.

��� All the info we have on unusual CDR failures and what you can do
��� about them, appears in the new article live now at
<URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/ ����������� showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15800263>

��� I'll also include links to other articles, from the general to
��� the deeply technical, so you can explore this issue to whatever
��� depth you want.

���
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