(TV) FW: Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs

["Howard Webb" <howard@howardwebb.com>]

>From a Yahoo group I'm a member of. I'm sure this will be a familiar story
to many of us who've been using CDRs for a number of years... Of course, I'm
not technically qualified to verify this, but bitter personal experience
means that I tend to agree with the assessment on CDRs given below.

My own theory of long-term data preservation is to carve hexadecimal data
into stone, then store the stone tablets in outer space. I figure about a
million tons of stone for an audio CD. I am currently looking for a course
that teaches astronautical stone-masonry.

-Howard

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 10 January 2006 22:22
To: 
Subject: Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs

Here's a scary little story I found today on ComputerWorld magazine's
website:
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,107607,00.
html?source=NLT_PM&nid=107607


Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs
And don't count on hard disk drives for long-term storage, either


News Story by John Blau

JANUARY 10, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Although opinions vary on how to
preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs, Kurt
Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this
view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use
magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span
of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke
said in an interview this week. "There are a few things you can do to
extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark
space, but not a whole lot more."

The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for
burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a
layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation
process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming
unreadable to the laser beam.

"Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life
span of around two years," Gerecke said. "Some of the better-quality discs
offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years."

[snip]
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