Shelf-life of storage medias

[gizz72]

Greetings,

I've looked in my CDRom back-ups the other day and I just found 4 CDRW that looked like crud! I mean, If you've seen wood eaten away by termites through a looking class.. that's what it looks like. Crud!!! :pissed:
Luckly, I still got the data to my hard drive temporarily and Re-Written them to a new(I believe sturdier looking) CDR's. Most of those CDRW's had(on the label side) silver surface, at least I got them cheap($0.05 a piece). The replacements were a wee bit expensive($0.50 per piece).

Are there any better/alternative storage media availble, which at least longer, say 10 years or more?(those CDRW's least only 3 months before I notice its decay(?!?), or do I need to buy much more expensive CDR/W's or DVD Discs(Expensive ATM)?

IMO, I would never count on floppies. Tapebackups are reasonalbe but unavailable on the Amiga. ZIP drives are Seldom avaible, but has considerable storage capacity, but I question their Shelf life?

Any thoughts in this? Thanks all.. :-D

regards,

Gizz

[odin]

Three months is no good, must've been a faulty batch or something. CD-R's should be able to survive quite a few years if stored away in the dark.

[gizz72]

Greetigns Odin,

Yes I believe they were. I went back to the place I bought them, they told it was faulty but they don't want to replace them cause it's really cheap. at $20 you have a box load of them, why bother. I'm lucky to save the contents in time. Besides, they keep on changing brands all the time. The same brand of the decaying CDRW were no longer sold there.

Regards

Gizz

[locutus]

your best bet on media with a long shell life would be MagnetoOptical disks, they last longer then both Onstream/DDS Tape, Harddisks and CD's.

[Castellen]

Or punched cards, they'd retain data pretty well over time.  :crazy:

Seriously though, I've had a really good run with the more expensive Kodak CDRs, in particular the Gold Plus and Ultima Silver+Gold discs.
They talk of data retention for up to 100 years, which is possibly true in *perfect* conditions, though I've had none of mine fail in 7 years.

The cheap CDRs can be pretty crap though.  Had problems with them too.


BTW, I have a new Seagate SCSI internal DDS tape drive if anyone's interested.  I understand there are Amiga progs to support them.

[whabang]

I have a burned copy of Quake II (don't hurt me), which I got before the game came out (97?). The CD was the first burned CD I ever got, and it still works fine. It's a Kodak gold.

[darksun9210]

yeah there are, even if you have a look through amibench there are a few progs that'll run tape drives. or coverdisk stuff like quarterback or amiback tools.

best tape backup software i ever used on the miggy was diavolo. could do file backups, or complete drive images. usefull if you used something like movieshop with a vlab motion or producer on the digital broadcaster *sigh*. or if you want fast backup and you know that your partition sizes are going to stay the same (better backup that RDB too)

[EdKing]

I have a Sony cdr recorded around 1993 that still looks and works fine. It was a backup copy of a friends Amiga BBS. The only problem with it is it was burned on Mac format, my PC doesn't like it, but my Amiga reads it just fine.

Ed King