It depends.
Ever since the days of popular music on magnetic tape it has been understood by many people that magnetic recordings fade with time. The floppy drive in my laptop still works well but most of my old disks have read errors. When I got my first CD burner (A rugged Sony that we still use. It is the only one we have that will read discs with paper labels. Paper labels make the discs warp when they get warm causing them to jamb in other drives.) I went through all my 3 1/2" floppies and copied everything I wanted to save onto cd's, then later combined them onto DVDs. >From my investigations, the best optical media seems to be Taiyo-Yuden DVD+R media (supermediastore.com). DVD-R media is said to be a kludge cobbled up from CD recording techniques, whereas DVD+R was made entirely new for DVD recording. Taiyo-Yuden is said to consistently make excellent media. I have also read that optical (CD and DVD) disks routinely have a large number of errors during apparently normal reads, but the high quality of error-correcting software now in use makes us unaware of this. Apparently I should transfer my optical archives now onto thumb drives or similar flash memory. BTW Edison's phonograph was the first (and apparently the only thing he actually invented - he did NOT invent the light bulb). However, in 1860, 17 years before Edison's machine, a Frenchman smoked a piece of paper, then scratched a line on it with a needle connected to a diaphragm thus making a recording. This recording was not meant to be played but simply observed. This artifact was recently scanned by laser and the recording, someone singing an excerpt from "Au clair de la lune", was recovered. www.firstsounds.org/sounds/ It would thus appear that where there is a will there is a way to recover obsolete data. A recent claim that sound (laughter) was recovered from clay pots that had been recorded as vibrations on tools as the pots were being turned on potters wheels in Pompeii turned out to be a joke. Norm S/V Bandersnatch Lying Julington Creek 30 07.695N 081 38.484W > I'm afraid that force of will has not proven to be a decisive factor in > data retention. If you have proof to the contrary, there are lots of > people who would love to see it. > Ben _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
