Some personal data points to add to the discussion: Wooden box = bad idea! You want a CHEMICALLY INERT container. Wood has all sorts of acids/ resins/whatever that may leach out and attack/contaminate the dyes that hold the data on your precious disks. Go for stainless steel (good luck finding that!) or archival plastics.
Optical disks: Go for the Gold! There is a hierarchy of long-term stability in the optical disk market, with gold, silver, and blue dyes representing decreasing stability. Guess which is hardest to find and most expensive to buy. You have been warned. Diversity tip: When burning multiple copies of disks, burn each copy onto a disk from a different manufacturing lot, or preferably a different manufacturer. The point is that anyone can manufacture the odd bad lot of disks. You don't want to find, ten years from now that ALL your copies of the wedding were burned onto disks from a single spindle that represented the same bad manufacturing run. 35 mm slides: You simply cannot talk about the longevity of slides without discussing their chemistry. There have been many, many chemistries used throughout the decades, and they vary widely in their longevity. As a general rule, only Kodachromes can be expected to last. Anything else manufactured up to maybe two decades ago is either already lost or seriously degraded. Newer emulsions should last longer, BUT they will still eventually fade. It's what they do. Magnetic tapes: Ignore this talk about stray magnetic fields; it is damned difficult to erase a tape on purpose -- I've tried. It's degradation of the substrate and binding that you have to worry about. My personal long term experience is with analog (audio) tapes. Stuff from the 50s and 60s on acetate media is a real problem; polyester media has proven better. Video tapes from the 80s and 90s seem to suffer not from breakage/stretching that the earlier tapes suffer from, but loss of adhesion between the substrate and the magnetic material. I have not encountered (yet?) any of these problems with my DAT tape archives, although the oldest of them is no more than 15 years old. DAT drives, on the other hand, cannot be used in the same sentence with the word "longevitiy." Archiving data with tape means keeping a bare minimum of two working drives in storage. On Jan 5, 11:13 am, aussieshepsrock <ilovaussiesh...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hello All, Thanks for your input! > I wanted to 'expand' on how I'm handling this family photo archive > project. :-) [snip!] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
