On 07/21/2018 10:14 AM, Carlo Pisani via cctalk wrote:
hi
yesterday I was shocked by a couple of videos on Youtube where guys
pointed out their negative experiences with CD ROM and DVD RAM as
media for their own backup.
They complained their data completely lost after 5 years of storage in
CD ROMs, pointing out that their CDs were perfectly conserved and kept
clean without scratches, but all the data is gone lost since the media
is unreadable.
I've found in the past that problems with CDs are two-fold:
1) Deterioration of the media itself (which was particularly bad in the
early days)
2) Incompatibilities with media and/or the burning process across drives
and platforms.
The latter cropped up time and again, enough that I decided it was too
risky to keep data on CD because I might want to come back to it 5 or 10
(or more) years later and find that no hardware that I had available was
capable of reading it.
I don't know if DVD is any better; I developed a deep mistrust of any
optical media and so I avoid it except for transient stuff where there's no
alternative.
cheers
Jules
