My sister in-law is an archival librarian with the State library in Austin. She was just railing on CDs & DVDs and how "archivally poor" they are for permanent data storage, even when kept in the most pristine "air & light tight" conditions in an archival library. She and the state library still swear by microfiche and other silver coated films for permanent archival data storage. Ah technology at its finest! Clover Clamons [email protected]
________________________________ From: John Greer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:27 AM To: Texas Cavers Subject: Fw: [Texascavers] Re: archiving your cave data For those interested, we burned data onto a "permanent" DVD for a friend a year ago. They left it open in the office under florescent lights. It is now defunct. Apparently everybody but us knew that florescent lights destroy CD/DVDs. John ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Goldsmith <mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 9:41 AM Subject: Re: [Texascavers] Re: archiving your cave data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Expected_lifespan In short, Mixon is right - you'll have to copy the contents of a CD-R/DVD-R pretty often. More so than 20 years though. I've read an article, can't remember where - that said a CD-R that could last 10 years was pretty good. Organizing cd/dvd's by age seems like a good idea for this. Who's got the time for that though? In the process of moving, I was able to get data off of CD-R's (single speed, gold backed) as late as 1996. Silver backed single speed CD-RW's written around this time were completely unreadable, causing me to lose some data from that era. Just don't be fooled that they'll last 20 or 30 years. In my personal experience, they don't. Glen
