Life Span of our CD Archives

With the holidays over and our digital cameras cooling off on the window sill, we turn our thoughts to preserving and archiving these images of grandma's table spread and the kids creating confetti of the wrapping paper, not to mention the admirable save dad did when the dog hit the table doing 90 km. Got that one on digital movie.

Yes our memory sticks were smoking and our cameras were humming and the flashes lit our way to the New Year. So, what are we going to do with all of these images and digital movies?

Our first answer is to burn our holiday albums to CD's of course; after all that's why we have those burners, and purchased the stack of blanks that looks like a neo-silo sitting on the back of the desk. We are all ready to create family albums and send our CD's to unsuspecting relatives everywhere. Some new information may change our minds about where our images are stored.

Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH recently had an interview on COMPUTERWORLD where he expressed the opinion that data stored on CD's from CD burners would only last between 2 and 4 years. The way data is stored on digital CD from a burner is much different than the pressed CD's, such as music CD's. The degradation of the data is on the material level, and has nothing to do with how good your CD burner is, or what program you are using. Common optical discs used for burning (ie CD-R and CD-RW), have a recording surface layer of dye which can be modified by heat (such as a laser), to store data. The degradation process resulting from other heat sources (hot days, running inside the computer, storage by the noon day window) can result in the data "shifting" on the surface, causing the disk to become unreadable to the laser beam.

Mr. Gerecke suggests tape drives, citing that tapes will often last 50 to 60 years, perhaps more. Eventually they too will need to be transferred to new tapes or what ever we are using by that time. External hard-drives are also not the answer, as any magnetic media will eventually degrade. Currently there is no permanent storage solution for our images, mp3's and digital movies.

So again, what are we going to do with our memories?

There are several tips to keep our data safe, and the first is to use the best disks we can afford. There are differences and in this case the differences can be two years.

Also we want to store our disks in cold, dark places. Keep them covered, and don't let them lay around on desks, especially if the disks would be in direct sunlight, as by a window. We don't need a dark room (though that wouldn't hurt), but we do need someplace where direct sunlight and heat are not a worry.

We also want to clearly mark dates on the disks and use covers that are color cataloged for months of the year. This way, we can copy our disks to a hard drive and re-burn them to disk at regular times, keeping the copies safe and fresh. This can become very time consuming, so I would recommend moving to the DVD formats as soon as you can, since they hold a great deal more data, allowing less disks to manage and copy.

If you have a great deal of data on disks, then I would suggest an external disk copier, something that you can set to copy, and walk away from, which isn't going to slow down your computer or affect you in any other way. There are several on the market which are in reasonable price ranges. For example TEAC's brand new 1x1 DVD Duplicator is a stand-alone disc-to-disc DVD Duplicator system requiring no PC Connection. It can duplicate a single master DVD to a DVD?R at up to 16X speeds, resulting in an exact replica of a DVD disc in just over 6 minutes. Price between 338.847 Euro and 405.800 Euro ($409.08 US - $489.91 US)

What ever you wind up doing, insure that it is easy to maintain and easy to remember. Digital collections tend to grow very rapidly.