At 01:24 PM 10/9/04 +0200, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >How safe do people consider DVD-Rs as a backup media? Safer/Unsafer than >CD-Rs (which are not all that safe from my experience).
Yes, you're right. I always do double backups. Though I haven't had any bad reads yet (my CD-R data archive goes back to 1997), they are stored carefully. The DVD-Rs seem better protected than the CD-Rs in simple physical manufacturing terms, with heavier protection of the reflective layer. On the other hand, the data density means scratches come into play. I have to use DVD-Rs for larger projects because some of the source materials and manipulations for electronic music would take a dozen CD-Rs. They also hold video project backups. Though CD-Rs have gone through (and failed) testing (I think I referenced here a particularly rigorous Dutch test with discouraging results), I have not seen any serious data reports on DVD-Rs -- only because the 'advanced aging' tests don't seem to match the real-world aging results. That's what happened with the CD-Rs, and I expect it to be the case with DVD-Rs. I keep backups of critical material on hard drives, too. It's kind of discouraging, because there's a sense that archives of source material of all kinds will be deteriorating (or becoming obsolete) much faster than in the paper and film days. I try to keep material available for later use, but updating from cassettes to 5-inch floppies to 3-inch to CD-Rs to DVD-Rs just consumes too much time -- not to mention licenses, operating systems, hardware boards & boxes, computers, etc., that have to be kept around to use older material. Example: I thought I was safe in committing my entire performance art/music installation "In Bocca al Lupo" from 1985 to EPROM and flash RAM -- no floppies, no hard drives. It turned out both the EPROMs and flash RAM self-erase after a decade or so, so the installation and its data (it was a self-learning installation) are gone. I have the source code printed out, but the chance of replicating the project is pretty low. Since my use of technology in my music goes back to 1969 and computer technology back to 1977, you can bet I have, as they say, "issues". Just what I would NOT need right now would be premature failure rates with DVD-Rs! Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
