how good is the data reliability with CD ROM and DVD RAM?

On 7/23/18 9:51 AM, Alexander Schreiber via cctalk wrote: I seem to recall reading about a ""tape drive that wrote optically to the medium in such a way that it could be read optically without overly complex magnification. I want to say something between a good magnifying glass and a cheap microscope allowed people with nominally 20/20 vision to be able to read the bits on the tape. The tape also purportedly had a leader that was direction on how to read the tape manually (optically). The idea was that it was possible (all be it tedious) for a human to read the tape and gain access to the contents there in. Yep. I've read a few discussions where some of the oldest and biggest formats that take up the most space are the most likely to be recovered. ASCII text being one of the most likely. If you do use a less open / more proprietary format make sure to be mindful of what sort of blocking / chunking that it does. The idea being that you don't want corruption somewhere in the tape to render the rest of the tape inaccessible. This also nods towards redundancy. Having multiple copies of the same data different places on the tape and / or on multiple tapes makes it much more likely that if (read: when) corruption occurs, you don't actually have data loss because ideally redundant copies are good. Or at least between all of the copies you have at least one good aggregate copy of the data. -- Grant. . . . unix || die