There’s an article at http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=513486 that talks about how long a CD-R can be expected to last, and it ain’t long.
If I read it correctly, we’d best spend our money on CD-RWs if we want our archived music, photos, and other data to last more than a couple of years.
Well…we know vcr tapes have no longevity either…so what now?
Oral tradition is the only thing that lasts.
There have been only 5 methods that have proven to save information for hundreds of years:
Write it in a book, and have a monastery of monks copy it periodically in to new books. The danger is that there will start turning up translations penned by everyone that owns a thesaurus
Carve the information in to wood or stone, and store it in a dark, dry, safe place. 50 meters below the sands of Egypt is a good spot. Watch out for men with shovels, who may want to put your information on display in a museum
Weave it in to a tapestry and hang it in the back of a dark dry church with a alarming lack of bugs, but will have to be specially cleaned every time you want to look at it.
4)Buld a monument that can be seen from space. This method limits the amount of information stored, and is often is subject to wild interpretations.
Hmm…Iwonder if digital photos can be encoded as whistle tunes.
Bloody hell… Thanks for posting that Darwin. Could be a serious issue at home and at work for me!
Ha, I just had a vision matching the ending of Fahrenheit](http://imdb.com/title/tt0060390/%22%3EFahrenheit) 451 but instead of memorizing books they were memorizing descriptions of photographs.
Eddie
many thanks for the tip mike!
any hard disk on a computer can ware out aswell after some years.
this programe gives a warning before this happens http://www.unistal.com/crash_proof.html
it also does a lot of other stuff.
There’s nothing made that doesn’t fail someday.
That said, I’m not inclined to put too much concern into this yet.
I do think that how carefully you store and handle a CD-R will greatly influence its longevity, though, so if you want your homeburned to last a bit, store them in a clean, dry, dark, climate-controlled place, in their cases.
–James
Archival storage of anything is non-trivial. How many of you have color photographs that are showing fading? That’s another dye technology that may or may not be related to CD-R technology. Store those CR-Rs in the dark, like a file cabinet. The less the temperature changes over time, the better.
When you’re archiving something on a medium that relies on technology, you have another thing to consider. What are you going to play the thing back on? Last fall, I took home a bunch of reel to reel tapes from my parents’ house. Lots of things recorded by my family in the 60s and 70s, and by my grandparents. I was able to play back those tapes and transfer them to a more current medium (CD-R!). My dad has a recording of his father made on a wire recorder, maybe in the early 50s or late 40s. Anybody out there who can play that back? That’s only 55 years ago +/-
Having had the (awe-inspiring) pleasure of reading medieval books 500+ years old, I can vouch for this. There is something to be said for writing stuff down on animal skin and storing it in nice stable conditions (e.g. the Bodleian).
Estimates for durability of parchment (under amenable conditions) lie somewhere between 1500 and 2000 years … 
Az
Remember Voyager? They sent a disc out there made of gold that’s supposed to last zillions of years. So, the technology is there. Will there be a commercial-type burner for home use that burns pits into the plastic?
Tony
I have done a lot of antique photo scans and thought I was safeguarding things by burning discs… Bummer.
Well, we’re being a little unfair here: we’re comparing the longevity of books and photographs stored at perfectly controlled conditions with the longevity of CDRs stored under uncontrolled and potentially unfriendly conditions. Store these CDRs in a dark box under controlled temperature and they’ll probably last about as long as the books!
There’s also the cost factor. I suspect that these days, a herd of goats (with goatherds), a staff of hide preparers, and another staff of calligraphers would run the unit cost up a wee bit.
It costs more to burn CD-RWs instead of CD-Rs, and they may not last as long as a well-treated book, but they’re a lot cheaper than books, and it seems that they do last a whole lot longer than CD-Rs, though I guess no definitive tests have been done.
And, of course, there’s the question of access–the good ol’ Boyer-Moore Fast Loop-Slow Loop algorithm versus a limited index and just thumbing through the pages.
I can just see one monk, sitting at a computer screen, on the Web, reading off the screen to another monk with parchement, pen, and ink. It’d be a bit slow, doncha think?
Slashdot’s The Myth Of The 100-Year CD-Rom
The original CD-Rs were made with a thin layer of gold leaf that was “burned.” That’s probably where the 100-year number originated – from everything I’ve read, the gold CD-Rs should be very stable. I have a few left. Has anyone seen them for sale recently? Anyone remember when a single blank CD-R was $20?
Nice avatar: by pure coincidence there’s an exhibtion of the painter’s work and his contemporaries running in Hamburg at the moment, where I’m currently living and working.
Hamburg, Germany, that is :=)
Az
“And then in the last panel Garfield said…”
Caj