Archiving Digital Data an Unsolved Problem 405
mattnyc99 writes, "It's a huge challenge: how to store digital files so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?" From the article: "[US national archivist] Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document — created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media — for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, 'Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it.'"
Microsoft to help! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft to help! (Score:5, Funny)
And remember: nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
"Plays for Sure" vs Zune for Office? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. Microsoft's commitment to their "Plays for Sure" campaign with the Zune really instills confidence in their backwards compatability.
At least with OpenOffice I can legally archive the source code and install images needed to access the data for that period (say, every year or six months.) Sort of like dropping a copy of TrueCrypt on a DVD full of crypto archives.
With the new DRM keys and license enforcement policies, I dread someday trying to resurrect an old image so I can access data archives, only to find it wants to register with a DRM verification service that no longer runs or is no longer compatible with a 4-5 year old install image.
Re:Microsoft to help! (Score:4, Funny)
That's not a word.
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Not too long... (Score:5, Funny)
So, they're shooting for about 10 years then?
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10 years or the next presidential election - whichever comes first
Re:Not too long... (Score:5, Interesting)
Making a format that will survive a thousand years so long as our advanced civilization is still around and still cares is pointless, because as long as there is a continuous line of people that care, they will be willing to transfer at least the more important stuff to new media. The trick is coming up with something that will still be readable when archaeologists dig it up 10, 50, or 100 thousand years from now.
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Re:Not too long... (Score:4, Interesting)
Archaeology is the search for fact. Not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Doctor Tyree's Philosophy class is right down the hall. So forget any ideas you've got about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and 'X' never, ever marks the spot. Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading.
-- Indiana Jones and the Last CrusadeRe: (Score:3, Informative)
Personally I think it's wonderful that the Romans were so kind as to give us such a great plot device.
Re:Not too long... (Score:5, Insightful)
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As much as anything, it seems like we might worry about people rewriting the past. It'd be hard to edit part of one of the original copies of the US Constitution without anyone being able to tell the difference, because we actually have a really old piece of paper that someone would have to get access to, somehow erase some ink, and write over top with identical ink.
But a historical document in the form of a text file on someone's hard drive? That can be edited without a trace.
Forgotten (Score:3, Insightful)
In 100 years, you will be forgotten.
In 1000 years, your country will be forgotten.
In 10000 years, your civilisation will be forgotten.
In 100000 years, your species will be forgotten.
One thing you can absolutely count on is that you and everything you find familiar will be lost and forgotten. Nothing that you accomplish, no matter how famous, infamous or worthy will be remembered in 10,000 years.
There is only one contribution you can make which will have any lasting effect at all, and I'll let you work
Re:Forgotten (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not too long... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you trying to say she didn't do that?
Crap, I am so getting an F on my history paper.
Re:Not too long... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not too long... (Score:4, Interesting)
History is interesting, school makes it suck: "In Year ABC, XYZ happened. Test next week - students who regurgitate well will get an 'A'."
People don't want to be sheep - totalitarian governments need populations to be docile. School is designed to suck the uniqueness out of children so, as adults, they'll take up a spot on a standardized assembly line.
Kinda cruel how the government has encouraged the shipping of assembly line jobs to China... Dumb down the population, then get rid of the reason for the dumbing-down.
See Gatto's Underground History [johntaylorgatto.com], for example.
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Rome fell a very long time after it stopped being a republic. We've already had our equivalent of pirates burning Ostia and leaders trying to be king afterwards. I think George has blown his shot at being George III and things will stay as a republic - barring unlikely actions by uncontrolled intelligence agencies going rogue if a future leader tries to reign them in.
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There are two basic strate
How is this different (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this different (Score:4, Interesting)
Its different because of the sheer volume of information being created today. Ancient cultures were not creating millions of pages of information every day.
Your Rosetta Stone analogy is inappropriate. We have not discovered any sort of Rosetta Stone for the ancient Maya hieroglyphs but we have had success in deciphering them because we can apply linguistic analysis techniques to figure out what words correspond to what actions/things. Its a little more complicated for abstract concepts, but you can figure out a surprising amount from basic language knowledge.
Re:How is this different (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much the Rosetta stone, but the fact that a "Rosetta stone" has a built-in context - it's obviously communication or artwork of some kind. If you have a big pile of digital data, what is it? An image? Compressed text? Audio? Just a sequence of numbers? The thing "printed" information gives you is that the presentation of the data gives you an idea of what it is - we don't yet have any digital data formats for which the presentation of the data gives an idea of the content; in fact, most digital storage mechanisms present all types of information in identical manner.
That's the real challenge - devising a digital storage format in which presentation can be used to apply context to the data.
Re:How is this different (Score:4, Funny)
That's what MIME types are for. Duh.
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If you found a bunch of punch cards then what would you make of them ?
They are obviously some kind of communication, because they have no artistic value. Whether they are designed to communicate with humans or a Jaccard loom is not the point. They convey information. Same goes for digital. Once someone discovers discrete patterns of ones and zeros, then the intention can be deduced. If the repeating pattern is "knit one pearl two" then you're probably reading a knitting pattern. If it says "Four sco
Re:How is this different (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this different (Score:4, Interesting)
They might not know that a byte is 8 bits, but with a little analysis, it shouldn't be hard to figure out. There are numerous statistical properties that can be exploited to figure this out relatively easily. For example, with most types of data, the higher-order bits (in any size byte) are more likely to be 0 than the lower-order bits are. Think about how booleans are stored in most systems. Think about the characters in this message: 100% of them have a zero high-order bit. To put it a little differently, there is more entropy in the lower-order bits.
So, to figure out how many bits there are in a byte, you take your data, and for all reasonable sizes of bytes (say, from 4 bit bytes up to 36 bit bytes), you compute the function that maps bit position (low- or high-order) to an entropy value for that bit. Then you can tell by the shape of that curve which guess about bits per byte was the right guess. Heck, it should be such a strong trend that you can probably automate it!
Remember that future civilizations will probably also use digital data as well, at least ones sophisticated enough to try to read the optical and magnetic media. They may not know the FAT32 filesystem, but they will have invented statistics and information theory, and they will be able to make some awfully good guesses at things. And yeah, it might take them 10 or 20 years to be able to read a FAT32 volume correctly if some poor college student of the distant future has to do it on a shoestring budget of grant money, but if they're reading 10,000 year old data, how much does that matter?
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How is this different than the previous ages where all information was kept on paper or in spoken words?
Paper actually holds up rather well as an archival medium. Plus, you don't need specialized technology to read it.
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I do. (Adjusts glasses)
--Rob
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Paper can hold up - we have proof of that in centuries-old paper. But when you look at the percentage of paper that's survived the last few thousand years compared to a) the amount of paper produced and b) the amount of information lost, it's staggering.
There's no one answer, but rather a set of keys that'll help. These include regular backups, widely adopted standards, multiple backup formats, important backups on
Re:How is this different (Score:5, Interesting)
The era of restoration comes. However, when people blow the dust off those old DVDs and players, they discover that the DVDs have decayed to the point of unreadability. Massive quantities of archived data and knowledge are irretrievably lost.
The main problem in our age is thermodynamics -- information is stored so densely that it tends to decay naturally, on its own. By contrast, ancient stone carvings (as well as their keys, such as the Rosetta stone), are sufficiently durable to last (basically) for ever.
Aw crap! (Score:2)
There goes my copy of Just Like Heaven [imdb.com]! Oh the humanity!
Re:How is this different (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How is this different (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ultimately, information only survives if it has been duplicated. The Domesday book laserdisc format wasn't easy to duplicate. It wasn't usable on home PCs, only on specially constructed reader machines in libraries. Consequently, it gathered dust in the "cathedral" it
hieroglyphics (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course that doesn't fix the problem of archive stability. Tapes are supposed to be relatively long-lived compared, say to a simple CD-R, but haven't we all had one or many more fail on us?
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I've heard this problem over and over (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I've heard this problem over and over (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, who's to decide what is 'crap' or not. It might be that to the untrained eye, a clay pot from Egypt might not look interesting. The color, shape, its condition, etc might tell someone who used it, why, what cultural value (symbology, usefullness, etc) the pot actually had. And culture evolves from culture. Keeping a record of everything we product allows future generations to inform themselves of who we were and what we did. Quality of the information itself is really unimportant.
Only thing I'd have to add: I wish future generations all the luck in sorting through our garbage piles and recycling/salvaging what they can. If anything, this amount of waste - or crap - is a record of us as much as anything. I can agree with you on this point about crap in our culture!!!
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I'll wager you could reconstruct far more about the culture of early 21st century from the contents of a convenience store than that of the White House. There's a big gulf between who a people are and the mask they present to the world.
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If this is the case, then archaeology will not have changed much. The most useful findings in archaeology are often those found in the waste piles ("middens") of the site.
Speaking of trash... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I've heard this problem over and over (Score:4, Insightful)
If preservation is outlawed, only outlaws will be preservationists.
I believe Ray Bradbury had something to say on this subject.
KFG
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Extra irony points. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps more ironic -- it's a pretty good bet that whatever he wrote on the subject, it's not available online due to copyright restrictions imposed by his publisher or "estate."
Re:Extra irony points. (Score:4, Funny)
KFG
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Huh. So the FSF will win by default. You gotta hand it to somebody who is willing to play the long game.
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Re:I've heard this problem over and over (Score:4, Funny)
Working at a University, this is not a subject I'm not unfamiliar with. We've had lots of discussions about this. Everyone always talks about how many zillions of "pieces of information" are out there. The number of web pages in existence is always brandied about.
Where can I attend these meetings, where people speak in triple negatives and much brandy is available?
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Most people are disinterested in history, hence there is no guarantee of a verbal knowledge continuum in the event of widespread hardware failure.
We know that the hardware always eventually fails.
We know that hardware always becomes obsolete.
We know that civilisations always fall.
We also know that these things have happened in the past, resulting in the loss of knowledge (in some cases it was because the language became extinct, and has never been decip
A huge problem, indeed! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not easy, sure, but neither are many of the other tasks we take on as humans.
Funding (Score:3, Interesting)
My solution for digital photos? (Score:4, Informative)
Storage itself? Currently burning onto Delkin Archival Gold [delkin.com], storing cool and dark, and in two physically distant locations.
They're also stored on my harddisk, and the best are backed up onto a USB drive.
If it looks like the DVD-ROM drive is becoming obsolete I'll burn them on to whatever comes along next.
If you're truly paranoid you can always print them on archival quality paper using pigment based inks
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Store the files in Notes/Domino! (Score:2)
Open, well-used, file formats. (Score:5, Insightful)
For text documents, HTML is probably the best bet. It is so widely used and supported readers are almost garunteed to exist as long as computers do in their current form. (And if something ever truely supersedes it, a mass-conversion program will be written anyway.) HTML probably works for basic spreadsheets too. Graphics support for GIF, JPEG, and PNG is probably at that level as well, and MP3 for music.
As a bonus, most of the native programs for the documents to be preserved have translators to these formats already.
Beyond that I have no idea.
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Depends on how deep your pockets are. There's a warehouse in eastern PA that has a MicroVAX, a couple of VT240s and an extensive collection of TK50s holding scads of MOL files and pre-clinical trials data "just in case". Not sure if they'll revive everything and re-package it now that there are VAX emulators available, but if you've got data worth (potentially) several hundred million dollars, you'll go to extensi
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Provide an example source reader (Score:2)
This wouldn't help you if you expect people to lose the ability to read the media that you're storing the data and source code on, but that's a much more complicat
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I think your general sentiment is worthwhile, but HTML for word processing documents, JPEGs for pictures, MP3s for audio? Geeze, lets at least be thinking more along the lines of ODF/PDF, PNG24, and FLAC.
However, that doesn't really address the question of medium. It'd be nice to have some sort of nearly-indestructable medium to store all this.
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As for music I agree Either FLAC or Wav depending on what you want.
Media? Codac used to make some gold cds that they claimed lasted 12 times as long as the average cd. Other than that you should look at something like a good oldfasioned stone. They last a real long time.
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FLAC... Isn't widely enough used, in my opinion. WAV or AIFF perhaps.
Of course, these are all of the top of my head. Giv
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Thats stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also to assume that future generations won't have the sense or ability to figure out how to open files we write is silly.
Because "
Popular Mechanics asks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously not; Popular Mechanics itself has preserved much of the era in traditional hardcopy formats, making it no less lossy than previous printed-word eras.
Of course, understanding the era from such incomplete and unreliable records will be a challenge to archaeologists and historians; again, not much different from previous eras.
In conclusion: doesn't matter, hardly news.
Government Area of Expertise (Score:5, Funny)
I'd trust that guy. If there's one thing our governrment knows, it's stupidity.
HD-DVD - dark data (Score:2, Funny)
The solution (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is 60 years of archives of antiquated, proprietary, task-spcific and mainframe computer data cards and tapes whose original programmers are halfway to cedar boxes; if the government can't get their support in time it may as well call all the early stuff a loss and hand it over to archaeologists.
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Easy To Do (Score:2)
Quite simply, you don't store them in one format. Just move everything every 10 years or so. In fact, with Moore's Law and all, you will probably be able to store everything you had before in 1 of whatever is new 10 years later. Hire some part timers to move it or something. It's not a hard problem. It's just an inconvenient one.
It's whether it's WORTH it (Score:5, Insightful)
It really isn't a question WHETHER we will be able to read old digital data in the future. After all, humans invented these formats, flawed as they may be, and humans can decipher them with enough effort. We can crack cryptography -- a deliberate attempt to make it as difficult as possible to decipher certain information. So it's hard to imagine any data format that could not be deciphered in the future with some honest effort.
Instead it is a question of whether the data is WORTH the effort. From an anthropological standpoint, this is valuable historical data, and its value is not decreased by our inability to interpret it. The benefit of digital data is that it can be copied even if we don't know what it means. It will not erode or decay like other historical artifacts, if we put in the small effort required to preserve it. Assuming humanity doesn't self-destruct, there will be plenty of time in the future for historians to decipher and interpret the data when a need arises for it.
Luxury problem... (Score:2)
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Stuff I can't read (Score:3, Interesting)
UK/BBC Domesday book (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, 15 years on, it was useless. The then-proprietary format was not readable on anything modern, and there was not much of the old hardware around either. You can google for it ("UK domesday bbc data" should do it), the first link I saw was on the Guardian Online [guardian.co.uk].
I've still got stuff on floppies, but no-one builds PCs with them anymore. I've got two old laptops with floppy drives, the other three computers have none. (OK, I also have two corpses with floppy drives, and the controllers on two of the new PCs will accept floppy drives, but, please take my point - they're going out of fashion.)
In 20 years time, there will probably be no CD/DVD drives, we'll all be using a new more portable, more backupable, lighter, faster, probably online-only storage medium. Kids won't recognize laserdisks, floppies, or USB ports. They might not recognise keyboards either - who knows?
Reverse engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
Obligatory quote ;) (Score:3, Funny)
Open Standards (Score:2)
How Ironic... (Score:2)
"Will an entire era of human history be lost?"
How ironic that in an age where we have the highest capability to preserve our history, it can become obsolete in a matter of decades. Take the 5 1/4" floppy disc. Assuming that the disk didn't loose it's magnetically bound data, I would be hard pressed in 2006 to find a drive that couuld read it. I don't even have a 3 1/2" drive anymore.
Another example. My father has a magnetic real from the 30's with a radio recording of my great grandfather. We have
For as long... (Score:2)
An archive already exists... (Score:2)
Digital Archives (Score:2)
CAMiLEON http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ [umich.edu]
Cedars http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/ [leeds.ac.uk]
InterPARES http://www.interpares.org/ [interpares.org]
DSPace http://www.dspace.org/ [dspace.org]
Lockheed Martin won the NARA contract to develop the Electronic Records Archives.
http://www.archives.gov/era/acquisition/option-awa rd.html [archives.gov]
After hearin
as long as the us remains a republic? (Score:2)
I'm doing my part... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm doing my part by working on a project where I'm copying every single MySpace page onto stone tablets.
When future archeologists dig them up and see "LOL Bobby Ray Sucks!" and "D00d 1 pwnz3r3d U!!1!", they'll understand that our civilization didn't just decline; our only choice was to destroy ourselves because we were so lame.
Relax... Google will take care of it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Will an entire era of human history be lost? Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
The question isn't IF it will disappear, the question is really WHEN and HOW. Printing to paper-based hardcopy helps for a few hundred years. It can be recopied from paper to paper easily - it's a very low context solution: ink on paper followed by ink on paper. So, important information about our society can be transferred across generations, even if the generations have no electricity at all. This is how we know Shakespeare, for instance.
Many people say "Oh, but we'll have some NEW technology that will take care of it". This assumes that the resource base for a new technology will be as generous and dense as our present resource base provides. This is a VERY unwise presumption, as there is categorically no proof that such will be the case. In fact, there are a variety of intense warning signs that suggest quite the contrary. [msn.com]
From the evidence I have found, and, oddly, I've studied this for a number of years now, I am fairly well convinced that industrial civilisation will simply erase itself from the human record as little more than a horribly polluted stain that destroyed itself through overpopulation and environmental stupidity. All the music you hear, all the shows you watch, all the films you cried at, it will all go away. Poof. This also means that self-absorbed hucksters like Madonna, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, and their supporting technology of TV, Radio, DVD/CD, etc will also disappear - just the flotsam of "entertainment" culture.
The long term future will be people chasing bison/cows across the prairie or living in small agrarian villages bound by localised population bursts and die-offs. But it will take several centuries to get their. In the meantime we've got our MTV and Orange Crush. The most important thing to remember is this: not getting to that Star Trek future IS NOT A BAD THING. We pissed away the globe's resources on our Xbox's, SUVs, jetset vacationlands, and all the other minutae and ephemera that makes a society "civilised" and provides "leisure activity". All societies have that, to varying degrees. We just had more of it, thanks to our insane and unrelenting exploitation of resources, petroleum, and electrical generation. But it will all go away, and THAT'S OK.
We will disappear. We Are Atlantis.
RS
Long Time Gone (Score:4, Insightful)
I ask: has this ever happened before?
Not necessarily in electronic bits and bytes. Not the "Alexandria Library" that was mostly duplicated in other libraries or private collections. Maybe like the Inca quipu, mats of knotted strings that recorded all their empire's operational records, other than the ceremonial records in statues and murals. But some quipu survive, despite Spaniards destroying most of them in the mid-1500s. Enough that we can at least recognize that they did have records of lots of transactions.
No, something more transient, as transient as our bits, read/written by something more transient than our metal/plastic/glass machines. Maybe songs or other performed stories, like tribal Australians. Maybe woven in more degradable material, like uncured plant matter. Maybe both, like the Pacific star navigation lore taught in temporary woven stics, but carried in the mind. Maybe patterns in some other loseable medium, like animal pelt patterns no longer readable now that the code has been lost, or interbred back into "blankness".
If it can happen to us, it could have happened before. Our civilization rose from meager beginnings only about 12K years ago, after the last Ice Age that lasted about 12Ky. There was another one before that, with people accumulating knowledge between. And probably a half-dozen or so others since we became as genetically developed as we are today, between 7Mya and 200Kya. We don't even have many records from the first half of the last 12Ky. Could we be reinventing the wheel, literally, every 25 thousand years?
A related problem: Digital artworks (Score:3, Insightful)
Console games are semi-okay because you can at least keep the (static) hardware around, but PC games are in bad shape. PCs evolve gradually, and it only takes one small OS or video driver change to render a game unplayable. Because games are a commercial medium, games simply aren't supported once it's no longer financially beneficial.
As long as there are programmers out there willing to write emulators, I suppose we're okay... but it still makes me nervous.
That's easy... (Score:3, Funny)
can just read it all back in again with OCR! Oh, I know we could use
punch cards instead, but we don't want our kids to laugh at us, do we?
Besides, if we print the ones and zeros real small, we can achieve higher
data densities.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site marking (Score:4, Interesting)
While the WIPP site won't have the benefit of constant updating of the media (it's designed to be survive on its own for 10,000 years) it does address some of the same points; longevity of the media, a format that will be usable into the future, and ability of future civilizations to understand the message.
Off-topic perhaps but an interesting read.
Pre-IBM Compatible (Score:3, Insightful)
That dosen't have to be the case though, you can retrieve files from disks of hundreds of different 80's era computers on a modern PC using a Catweasel card. http://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm [vesalia.de]
With the catweasel, a standard 5.25" PC floppy disk drive (hello, ebay), and a 3.5" PC floppy disk drive there's hardly a floppy disk you won't be able to retrieve your petrified files from.
Finding a program that can do anything with those files is another subject entirely.
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The first burnable cds you could buy (in the 90ties) were of a decent quality, i still have some burned ones around, and they are still readable (older than 10yrs).
But some newer ones (cheaper, & mass-marketing 'mode') are of an awful quality: i have plenty that "died" when reading them: it begins with some bad CRCs, and then more & more & more, till nothing valuable can be read off it. This happened in LESS THAN 2 YEARS.
The problem w
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That said, there are some newer dyes that are claimed to be st