If, as I do, you're burning off CD-Rs and collecting them off-site, then they're fine. And as for long-term viability, you can always just copy them onto a new disc once in a while - and if you're making sequential copies, then being able to go back to last year's discs isn't important when you've also got yesterday's. I really can't see how this can be made either easier or safer by carting numerous portable hard drives around.
Well, as always there are several sides to this. If you frequently have to backup projects, which are many Gigs of Data, CD-R backups actually take you hours, if not days. It is slightly easier with DVD-Rs but I have projects where even DVD-Rs mean burning several. Using a HD for your daily backups is much easier, plus you can keep many versions of your project on one HD.
Naturally, if my place burns down, these backups are going to be lost, too. That's why I make backups of those projects to CD-R, or recently to DVD-R, as well.
However, from my own experience I think I can say that the failure rate of CD-Rs is much higher than that of backup HDs. I would no longer trust a single backup on CD-R, ever. In the last few years I have kept backups of Audio projects on CD-Rs. Of those (altogether perhaps around 100 CD-Rs) I have had about 6 complete failures. Both expensive and inexpensive media, all burnt at speeds up to 8x. That's approximately 6%. Some of those failures turned out to have scratches (so you could argue I didn't treat them well enough, although this happens very easily when simply taking out a CD from it's case), some I could not see any trace of machanical problems.
I personally make my regular backups (eg at least daily while I am working on a Finale project) on an external HD (I only recently started doing this and find it much faster than doing this with CD-Rs). I also make CD-R, and recently DVD-R backups regularly, but with longer intervals (depending very much on how much work I do with the computer, it is not my main income). I also make several backups of completed projects on CD-R/DVD-R.
The original statement was about the shelf-live of HDs compared to CD-Rs. I cannot agree, out of my own experience, that CD-Rs are more reliable in this respect than HDs.
Needless to say noone knows how either will behave in 20 years time.
Johannes -- http://www.musikmanufaktur.com http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de
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