archival cd-r - really true?

Richard wrote: I tend to use both hard disk and tape (DLT these days, DAT tapes seem reliable enough, but I got fed up with the drives going bad on me). The thing that bugs me about CDs is that I've seen so many incompatibilities between media and drives - I wouldn't want to get x years down the line and find that the discs that I wrote on long-dead hardware refuse to read on whatever hardware I can lay my hands on at the time. Sure, you can test discs in a few different machines - but the incompatibility rate is just too high to give me peace of mind. I've never had that problem with disks and tape drives - a tape written on one system will work happily in a drive on another from a totally different vendor IME, or a disk will happily plug into a SCSI bus on a different machine and work etc. [1] [1] Actually, I did have a problem a few months back where a Quantum disk refused to share a SCSI bus with a Seagate drive until I'd patched its firmware - but in a data restore scenario I *could* have put it on its own SCSI bus if I absolutely had to. I've just been reliving CD horrors these last few days actually, so it's something of a sore point at the moment - as I avoid CDs as much as possible I hadn't used either of my two burners in several years, but needed to burn a CD to boot on a floppy-less laptop. *both* of my burners seem to have died whilst in storage, and a borrowed laptop with a burner on it refused to burn CDs that would work in anything other than a select number of machines regardless of media tried (needless to say, it refused to write a disk that would work in the laptop I absolutely *needed* it to work in!). Luckily I sourced a couple of SCSI burners that were being thrown out locally, and one of those has done the job quite happily :) Still, served to remind me just why I don't like the darn things... I suppose if the data is critical, small enough in size, and the media is available at sufficient quality, go for the coarsest grain media you can get - e.g. 9 track or floppies, say. At least that way if something *does* happen there's more chance you can get the data off the media using recovery tools. cheers Jules