The Myth Of The 100-Year CD-Rom

Toshito writes "Are we putting too much faith in the ubiquitous "recordable CD", or CD-R? A lot of manufacturer claims 100 years of shelf life for a CD-R. But in real life, it can be much less. Expect failure after only 5 years... Personnaly I just discovered 6 audio cassettes with the voice of my late grandfather, talking about old times. These tapes are copies of reel to reel recorded in 1971, and they are still in excellent shape. I was thinking about digitizing everything, do a little noise reduction, and burning this on CD's, for my childrens and great grand-childrens enjoyment, but it seems that old analog tech from the '70 is more reliable than digital. The full story at Rense. Other links about the subject: Practical PC, Mscience, and an excellent reasearch by the Library of Congress (warning! PDF): Study of CD longevity, html version (google):Study html."

Using RIAA math

[Anonymous Coward]

The 100 year CD-ROM becomes a 27 million year CD-ROM, and they plan to have their copyrights extended that far.

Solution!

[Morgahastu]

Store them on a series of floppy diskettes. They have proven to be VERY reliable. ;)

Eternal archiving.

[Guano_Jim]

Rename the MP3s of your grandfather's voice to coors_twins_baby_oil.mpg and put it on Kazaa.

Repeat every year with the current cover girls of Maxim, Stuff, or whatever men's mag suits your fancy.

Guarantee you'll never be at a loss for a copy of dear old granddad.

Re:Nonsense!

[Neon Spiral Injector]

What happens when the amount time it takes to transfer all the data from one medium to another is longer than the life time of the media on which it currently resides?

Re:Eternal archiving.

[lacrymology.com]

Yeah but if I d/l that recording of his grandfather's voice, then his family will sue me for copyright infringement!

-m

Re:CD Rot

[TedCheshireAcad]

Ripping the reflective surface off CDRs is a good way to impress kids with shiny things. The only problem is, they then want to do it.

While counselor at a computer camp, once I showed a kid how to rip the reflective face off a CDR with some duct tape, and he spread that information to all the kids. Little did they know that the dye underneath is toxic, and like 7 or 8 kids were puking up their lunch later on. I told the boss I had no idea what happened. :-\

CD tips for longetivity

[jd]

• Avoid exposure to UV radiation. Keep locked in a lead casket when not in use.
  
• To prevent chemical reactions from affecting the disk, keep chilled at -90' or so. Liquid notrogen is a useful cooling system.
  
• Prevent scratches by always using ultra-smooth surfaces and clean-room environments.
  
• To stop acids and other chemicals from the body attacking the CD, use those space-suits from the Intel commercials.
  

Now, you can enjoy your CDs for a long time...

Re:Solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, get some nice, archival-quality acid-free paper and a high-quality printer and print out your data as a long string of 1's and 0's. Even 'betterer', have a book company print your data. Hardcover, of course. Then store the books in a nice temperature- and humidity-controlled underground vault.

Simple

[eclectro]

Personnaly I just discovered 6 audio cassettes with the voice of my late grandfather.....I was thinking about digitizing everything, do a little noise reduction, and burning this on CD's, for my childrens and great grand-childrens enjoyment

Go ahead and digitize everything. Then get yourself a couple of accounts at Gmail [google.com] when it becomes available. Then email the audio to yourself. You will have it forever then.

Of course you will see a lot of google adwords for Geritol [geritol.com] and Ben Gay [yahoo.com], but nothing is perfect.

Re:You're citing Rense.com as an authority?

[WormholeFiend]

Chemtrails, CIA mindcontrol, UFOs, Bigfoot, and now CDRs...

Do I have to wrap my por^H^H data archives in tinfoil now as well?

Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

are there any other good long-term ways to store large amounts of data, other than what I'm already doing? (In my case, huge scans of image files.) I agree. The needs of the really dedicated pron archivist are being overlooked here. How would normal people like it if their significant other became slowly degraded over 10 years and became covered in dints and imperfections?

use gmail?

[Frederic54]

convert everything to mp3, and send them to your gmail account, they will be kept here forever in multiple redundant copies

Re:my first audio cds are dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Netcraft confirm this?

punchcards are better

[WormholeFiend]

that's why I bought the Unreal Tournament 2004 Special Punchcard Edition.

http://img53.photobucket.com/albums/v162/Cordata /U T04-PunchCard.gif

As long as I keep them in a dark and dry place, it's going to last forever!

Re:Or....

[No. 24601]

But be sure to use blanks from different manufacturers. Otherwise your failures won't be independent, so the odds of all your copies going bad at roughly the same time (i.e., before you notice the first one has failed) is high.

So i guess someone was paying attention in Stats class ;)

That does it

[AtariAmarok]

That does it. I'm converting all my mp3 collection to 8-track tapes. Does anyone know of a good 8-track tape recorder that mounts in a typical tower 5.25" drive bay to make this easy?

Re:As Linus Said

[Anonymous Coward]

"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." - Linus Torvalds

If it works for Grandpa...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then its good enough for me. Now, where do I buy a reel-to-reel drive to back up all my data?

CD-Roms ARE fragile

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why I store everything on zip drives.

Re:Eternal archiving.

[BarryJacobsen]

Daddy, what's great-grampa doing with those ladies?

Oh, sorry son. Wrong file. Don't tell your mother.

BIG HONKING HARD DRIVE!!

[The Mutant]

One Terrabyte [lacie.com] actually, for about $1199.

Yes, I can imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

If you want it to last forever...

[Anonymous Coward]

... post it on the internet!

Well..

[segfault7375]

2 words: planned obsolence. They (companies) do this for pretty much everything out there now.. Things are just not built to last like they used to be. :(

Re:Doooom(esday)!

[Some Dumbass...]

Wasn't that because the format they recorded it on was quite obscure and they couldn't find a player to read back the data ?

What did they use, 8-Track or Betamax?

Funny...

[__aagmrb7289]

I have about 50 CDs that are 10 or more years old? What are these people doing, storing their CDs in Coca Cola?

Re:Long term audio storage

[hankwang]

In addition, there is no special protocol needed to read them. A pin or sewing needle stuck in a paper cone will work!

True, when I was a kid, I used a home-built LEGO turntable with sewing needle and paper cone to play a couple of LPs that belonged to my father. I could listen to the music, but dad was not amused. :-)

Re:Audio CDs do die in an audible way

[Anonymous Coward]

I have this problem also. Are you using the big black CDs with the spiral grooves too?

Re:Solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

An even better solution is to cryogenically freeze all of the artists/musicians/whathaveyou and thaw them whenever you want to hear your favorite song because everyone knows that live performances are definitely better than those silly lossey analog recordings!

Re:Nonsense!

[Mateito]

> Record it to your HDD in an non-lossy format and > store copies of it on various friends' and > family members' computers. Better still, rip it to mp3 and put it up on Kazaa.

Re:Nonsense!

[SEWilco]

He needs a quantum storage device.
They store all possible data at the same time, and when you need a file it somehow produces the right file.

However, he probably doesn't have enough cats.

Re:CD Rot

[notsoclever]

Mmm, cyanide.

Re:As Linus Said

[SEWilco]

Real men write stuff that the rest of the world wants to copy.

Re:Nonsense!

[Phisbut]

How about this. Take your file, serialize it so it's a huge list of 1's and 0's, then pick up a cardboard card, divide it in the number of bits you have in your file, then punch a hole in the sections you need 1's and leave it untouched in the sections you need 0's.

Paper can last for thousands of years... this could be a good solution for long-term storage... right?

Re:NO JOKE

[red floyd]

No, the cassette was just changing to reflect the current Jackson.

Re:Reel to Reel WILL FAIL

[gewalker]

Yeah, but when my original's die, I just ask my good friend, Dr. Who, to pop back in time and make me another copy of the pristine original.

For real archival safety...

[punxking]

I say go with Iomega Zip disks, I...
hey, what's that clicking noise?

The embarassing part...

[gillbates]

Is that I can still read data from Iomega Zip disks that are 6 years old, yet can't read CD's I burned 6 months ago. For some reason, the perils of magnetic media and Zip drives never came true for me.

What really irks me is that CD-R was sold to the public as a way of _permanently_ archiving data. Once written, it was supposed to be permanent. The non-magnetic, non-rewritable nature of the media was supposed to prevent accidental overwrites and erasures from magnetic fields.

Top Ten reasons to love CD-R/CD-RW:

1. No Pesky Aborts or Retries: CD-R is the only media in which a failed write ruins the media. Retrying a failed write is so 80's. I never liked that "Abort, Retry, Ignore" stuff anyway....
2. No Multitasking: I don't like to surf the internet or do other things when a CD is being burned. I'd rather shut down all applications, turn off my screensaver*, and watch the progress meter and wait.
3. Home Improvement with the PC: I like having a CD coaster place setting for every chair at the dining room table. I could never ruin enough floppies for a full table's worth.
4. Software is Never Obsolete: You never have to worry about restoring obsolete software during a system restore - by the time the software is obsolete, your CD-R backup has long been unreadable.
5. No Pithy Operations: I hate updating single files. When I want to update an archive, I want to reburn the whole disk! (CD-R, some CD-RW here...)
6. Snazzy Disk-Cache Progress Meter: I like disk caches. In fact, I'm not comfortable with a file transfer until I see the "flushing cache to disk" progress meter.
7. Laid Back Attitude: I'm never in a hurry. Whether I'm just starting work or on my way out the door, I want a file transfer to take at least one minute. I would never want to save what I'm working on and immediately run out the door. (Office space, anyone?)
8. Security: With CD-R/CD-RW, your files are always safe from editing at a public or shared computer. Even should you come across a machine with a CD-RW drive installed, the read-write latency of a CD-RW will make editing the files practically impossible. And you can forget running an application from your removable media.
9. No Obsolete Computers: With UDF, all your friends and colleagues will have to upgrade to the latest Microsoft Operating system in order to read your disks.
10. Prosecutorial Immunity: Should your illegal mp3 CD-R collection get seized by the police, it will be unreadable by the time it gets to trial.

* - yes, these are the recommendations that came with a 2004 Toshiba laptop regarding making CD's.

Re:Nonsense!

[ericspinder]

Better than that...
Encode your data into the DNA of Cockroaches!

Re:Nonsense!

[The Unabageler]

what a scary thought...what if the human race is just some alien's way of storing their pr0n collection? talk about life being a joke!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Nonsense!

[Samhaine]

but, but, but... what happens when a random chad disappears from your punch card, and suddenly you're childhood Little League victory becomes an ignominous pummeling by a one armed transsexual in a wheelchair?

1971: The Age Before Time Began

[rjamestaylor]

You think that's something to have a recording from 1971? I've got hours and hours of tape from a group of guys in 1963 through 1967; it doesn't just have their voices but they sing, too! Songs about advice with girls (She Loves Me, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Baby You Can Drive My Car, Hey, Jude), recreational drugs (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Strawberry Fields), politics (everything else, basically). And my aged dad, now a granddad himself, has tapes and "LPs" (larger than a CD but with better quality audio; infinite bits, ya know) of dudes from the 1940s and 1950s! Whoo!

Damn kids. 1971 is a benchmark for longevity?

Use Paper tape for logitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your data on punched paper tape and store it in little stainless steel canisters taped shut so they will last really really long. But then you will need to find a paper tape reader in 100 years...