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Concerns About File Storage Media
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This may have been covered in another thread but I haven’t seen it.
About a week ago I was at an event in the US where I met some very talented photographers. I had a few good chats about various aspects of photography. Among other things I discussed digital file format and storage with one photographer. We agreed that concerns about file formats – RAW, TIFF, PSD, JPEG, etc – are overhyped and that there?ll always be some software around that will convert between major formats.
But file storage is a problem. Many CDs and DVDs are dye based. That means that the burner does not burn metal and do a proper etching of the ones and zeros that constitute the binary file data. Instead the burner colours or tints the dyes to represent those ones and zeros. This dye can fade enough in as little as five years to leave the data corrupted and unreadable. Hence anyone burning to budget dye-based DVDs and CDs should be concerned.
Has anyone any fuller info on this problem? And can anyone recommend quality CD and DVD blanks which really etch metal and have a long reliable data-storage life?
Might be interesting to have a look at the Technology section of the Optical Storage Technology Association site.
The thing about burning to metal-based as opposed to dye-based disks is that it will require an industrial grade burner to do this. It’s not something your average consumer grade burner will do.
I have CD’s that I burned over 10 years ago which are still readable. On the other hand, I’ve seen a CD literally disintegrate in less than a year – the physical plastic on the surface was still fine but the dye began to visibly break down.
There are a number of things you can do to mitigate the risk. The first is to forget about CD’s or DVD’s altogether and just back up everything on to hard disk drives (HDD). Portable HDD’s with USB connectivity are really cheap now buy two and back your data up to both at the same time. Leave them switched off when not in use, thereby reducing wear and tear on the disks bearings and other moving parts. The chances of boths disks failing at the same time are pretty slim so you will always have at least one disk to work from. And on a per MB basis they are much cheaper than CD’s or DVD’s.
The other optionis to simply copy your existing CD’s or DVD’s on to new ones every few years. Major pain in the butt, but it keeps everything safe!
Agree with Thorsten on the harddrive route.
Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 250GB USB2.0 for 110 euros with komplett.
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=318905Has got good reviews and will take a hell of a lot of pictures to fill it up. :)
A long reliable data-storage life is a Hard drive definitely.Thorsten, Banjo,
Thanks for the advice on that. I am now seriously considering moving to two external hard drives as recommended.
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