On Behalf Of Mike Sheil <snip>Clearly the only way to store CDs are in a jewel case where no contact is made between the surface of the CD and any possible contaminents in paper sleeves etc.
Mike, I'm sorry to hear about your loss of data... but I must take issue with you on the above. I do not believe it is safe to assume that jewel cases are safe. Plastics in the case could in my limited understanding be equally critical to the survival of your media.
The hard lesson that I try to get across to our clients is "don't put all your eggs in one basket".
Whether its CD's, Flash media, or hard drives.... you have to build in "redundancy".
That's a term that's largely been the reserve of network builders, but its true for everyone else who moves or stores data.... and lets face it ALL images these days are stored as 'data'.
"Redundancy" means having an identical set of data, usually working on an independent system, that you can change to in the event of a complete failure on your primary system. In other words, in this case, having two archives but on independent media (eg.one on CD another on hard drive).
If you think about it we always had that in traditional photography.... we usually relied on the finished print as the real product that was archived. But we also had the negative also archived. That was a kind of 'redundancy' in that system.
And remember those clients who lost the original tranny, despite being told it was unreplacable, well that's the equivalent of us just trying to store our stuff once on a CD.
--
Best'
..ED
Ed Horwich
md & information architect
PACIFICSTREAM Audit Report Advise Design & Implement for the Web
http://www.pacificstream.com
(+44) 0870-740-9211
(+44) 07976-407.472
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