Should you store treasured data on disks?

[David Gerard]

On 26 June 2010 12:11, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:

> The most expensive should be the ones that last the longest - gold CD-Rs
> were commanding top dollar compared to the reds/blues/greens with one
> gold CD-R being worth a whole stack of the latter kind. But that was
> years ago...
> Not sure how things stand today.


If a disk is advertised as "archival", with 100 years' life, that
means the manufacturer did their best to ascertain that it will really
last that long and that they are making a claim they think is true.

You need to keep it in suitable conditions, of course (i.e. not next
to the heater,not next to the kettle).

Personally, I use the "lots of copies" strategy. I back up my hard
disks to DVD every now and then, and also have twin 1.5TB hard disks
for media (CDs in FLAC, that sort of thing). I should keep a bundle of
important stuff on DVD at work ... This is just using cheap generic
DVDs, but "more than one copy" is IMO a very powerful strategy here.


- d.