burn several CDs of pictures, music and documents on my PB G4 Is there are a good brand or bad brand on the market?
And at 10:39 AM +0100 05/26/2004, Tom Burke replied:
You might want to have a look at this article on photo.net: http://www.photo.net/mjohnston/column53/
Decent article.
Their interest (and mine) is with the archival qualities of CDs for long-term storage of image files, and some of the conclusions that are emerging about CDs are a bit disturbing.
Emerging? ROFL There have been data retention issue articles and white papers written about CDs for years. The problem is that people actually believe the Marketing! ...FWIW, the problem, technically, is rust. Oxygen and other contaminants get into the disc (leech right thru the plastic or thru the poorly sealed edge) then causes oxide particles to form in the data pits, causing them to reflect the read-laser improperly.
Quite a lot of photographers are realising that the humble photo negative is actually a really good storage medium
*nod* Two years ago, my housemate when into a scanning frenzy using a borrowed a slide scanner. Luckily, I managed to talk him out of chucking the original slides... some of his CDs have already degraded.
Could we see a swing back to film? Hmm, probably not, but archival storage of images is a serious issue.
Archival. heh. I'll settle for CD media that live past 5 years. (I have a closet full of 9track tapes, btw! Written in the mid 80s, they're still good!)
At this point, me and mine (housemates and clients) have burned thousands of discs, mostly for backups. CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-flavours. I estimate that 2 to 5% of the discs that are 2 years or older are now unreadable. We use everything from expensive "Gold Archival" discs to no-names. Makes no diff. They all degrade.
My bottom line recommendations:
1. Brand matters little and pricing is definately not an indication of quality. Some stores seem to carry better quality discs than others. My overall fav is "GQ" (Great Quality), from Fry Electronics (aka outpost.com). Zero coasters and so far only 2 of those have degraded (out of 400+).
2. Make duplicates or maybe triplicates of the important stuff. Preferrably on different brand discs!
3. Make triplicates or maybe quadroooplicates of the really important stuff.
4. Keepa you fingers OFF. Even a little finger oil can ruin a disc. It may still burn without errors, but 1/4 of our degraded discs have smudges on them. (No, cleaning them doesn't make them suddenly readable).
5. Keepa them stored in good conditions. No cooking, freezing, or bending. What's cooking? Anything above 90 degrees.
6. Buy a drive cleaning kit (basically a CD with little brushes on it and a bottle of cleaning fluid). Use it regularly.
G'luck, - Dan.
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