In article <200603081717.k28HHjj5014774 at mwave.heeltoe.com>, Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> writes: That's what Ivan & Bert Sutherland said (it was Bert, I think) in a Computer History Museum video on google I watched the other day. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

I've been wondering about these as well. The perfect person to comment on this might be Tim Shoppa, I believe he did a lot of research into this a few years ago. Of course he might have a large enough stash of the original Kodak Gold CD-R's that he's not looked into recent blanks. I've sworn by Verbatium DataLifePlus blanks for nearly 10 years, but am a little nervous about the current ones after the last two on a spindle woudln't burn for me (one that was even older burned just fine). Zane

On 3/8/2006 at 3:32 PM Brad Parker wrote: snip]... I think the tests and articles in question are talking about the stability of the dyes used in the MAM-A (formerly Mitsui) CD-Rs. I'd be less optimistic about the stability of the polymers used for the disc substrate, but I'm probably not going to be around in 100 years to find out. Finding CD drives to read the blasted things in 100 years is going to be enough of a challenge. That being said, when we get a data conversion job, the results go out on MAM-A Gold discs and we've never had a complaint. Since the media is such a small part of the job cost, it's immaterial. 50 for $100 is a bit on the high end. We buy ours from one of the media wholesalers and pay less than $1.00 each in quantities of 100. We also get the PVC jewel cases for CDs that survive the rigors of shipping much better than do the styrene ones. Cheers, Chuck

I haven't seen the original post yet, and so haven't read the article in question. On 3/8/06, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: MAM-A claims 100 year expected life for their "Gold Lacquer DVD-R". Only $322 for the minimum order of 200. (Although I guess you can find them 50 for $100). Eric

John Allain wrote: I'm not sure this will be a popular view, but *nothing* is a good archival medium if it isn't maintained. I and several other listmembers have done a lot of transcription for entities - mostly University of Texas in my case - who scrupulously archived, double-archived, and preserved critical data. Then at some point they scrapped the hardware needed to access their prescious tapes. Or lost the backup/restore application used to make the archives. Or, or, or.... My real-world job is for a company who specializes in data management and data protection, and we put it to our clients as an axiom. All archived data needs to be tested and migrated on a frequent (3-5 years max) basis. I've never seen anything on CC that implies we should follow any different principle. My point is that in no case should you rely on the quality of your medium to preserve historical data, and which meium and which format you use should be (within reason) a matter of current convenience and accessibility. You'll be migrating it before that medium is obsolete or likely to expire. Nothing says you can't keep the original sets and the original equipment and tools, but that information should frequently be copied to whatever your environment currently handles. I have a lot of DOS and UNIX OS and applications stored as original media and as "dd", Teledisk and Winimage backups on 4mm DDS1 tape. I'll be keeping all that, but I'm also migrating it all to ImageDisk, dd, and mktape sets on DLT-IV and DVDR. Doc

David Holland wrote: Even if the MAM-A ones are good for 100 years, perhaps you've just burnt those precious memories to a dud that will fail within a few years. So you have to make multiple copies and check them on whatever regular basis seems reasonable to you. Keep one copy somewhere else so that you can cope with life's usual daily disasters (fire, flood, theft, kids with a scouring pad...) Keep the original media too - belt and braces! Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org

Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> wrote: I think from the prices and names used in the quoted text, that these comments are less than 3 years old. This is when Mitsui became MAM-A. Five and ten years ago, Kodak and a few Japanese companies also did gold disks. They left that business behind, I'm guessing the $ to be made were pretty small for what had become a "specialty" CD-R. No matter whether you get gold or silver or whatever, the biggest risk of all is scratching the top of the CD-R. The Kodak Gold had an extra coating on top which helped there. Even then the smart thing to do is put them in a good box. I'm going to speculate that in 20 years, CD-R readers are going to be somewhat specialty items, not too different than finding a vinyl record player today. Yeah, there's probably some store in town that has one or two. 100 years, that's a lot harder to guess. Media longevity is kinda irrelevant if your descendants throw it away because they don't know what it is or how to read it. (I'm 100% sure that most kids today don't know how to play a vinyl record... much less dial a rotary dial telephone!) It doesn't matter much that readers are available as long as everyone believes they aren't easy to find. In 100 years it'll be like a cylinder record. Yeah, my dad still has cylinder records and a player, as do museums. Tim.

At 9:18 PM -0500 3/8/06, William Donzelli wrote: It's also possible to get at least some parts for them. A few years ago, I bought my Dad a horn and 3 cylinders as a gift, and then snuck into the attic and got down his player, and got it cleaned up and working. Still need to find him a belt, I had to use some rubber bands :^( Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On 3/8/06 5:17 PM, "Tim Shoppa" <shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com> wrote: I can do both! Can I get a cookie over here? =] </17 year old> :D

Brad Parker wrote: Dunno. I had some stuff on one of the old Kodak gold CDs and all the gold started falling off about 5 years ago :-) Personally I wouldn't use any flavour of CD technology for anything. cheers Jules

On 3/9/2006 at 9:52 AM Richard wrote: Doc's right--use whatever is a reliable medium for 3-5 years, then copy. Keep a few generations around. When I look back over the archives that I've kept of my own work, the only thing that's survived more than 20 years has been 8" floppies. I've got other archives on DC-600, DC-1000, DC-6150, DC-6250, DDS-2, 8mm (exabyte), DLT, Bernoulli, Sparq, various types of 5.25" and 3.5" disks and maybe even the odd DC-2000 or two. I haven't tried the DC tapes in awhile--they may be okay, but the 8" floppies come through at close to 100%. I've lost CD-Rs simply by dropping them and having them roll under a desk (dirt on the floor will do a number on a CD-R (or CD) if the thing gets dragged across the floor. Recently, I archived my old GCR-encoded 5.25" 980K diskettes. While I still have some 100 tpi drives kicking around, they've gone to the realm of "deteriorating"and "very hard to find". Burned files and images onto CD-R. I intend to re-burn 5-10 years from now on whatever the popular medium is. I've sometimes wondered if the DC-1000 media would still read. I've still got the drive and probably could find the software and a machine (probably an old XT would do--certainly nothing much faster than that); but there's no point to it--I've carried the important stuff along with me for some time now. Copy, then recopy. The only real solution. Cheers, Chuck

On 3/9/2006 at 11:40 AM Doc Shipley wrote: In this case, the CD-R fell "jelly side down" (i.e., the top of the CD got scratched through to such an extent that I could see daylight through it). I've wondered if simply using a CD label might avoid the problem--if the adhesives in the label backing didn't attack the CD-R itself after a few years... I suppose that what bothers me most about the CD-ROM format is its insistence on using the "spiral groove" audio recording layout. While this makes for nice mass production, I'dve much rather had CD-ROMs recorded in concentric rings of data like a floppy. At least that way, one could seek to a given track without worrying about what came before it. On most CD-ROM drives that I know of, if the inner tracks are damaged, the CD won't even load. That the same approach is now being used on DVDs doesn't make me rest any easier. Cheers, Chuck

Rumor has it that Chuck Guzis may have mentioned these words: [snip] Yea, but at least the datalayer is in the *middle* of the disk instead of on the top... ;-) I noticed at wallyworld that they had some "Toughened" CD/DVD media that was supposed to have extra-strong layering to resist scratches better... [[ Methinks it was originally designed for DVD-based camcorders ]] That might not be a bad alternative... Laterz, "Merch" -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com What do you do when Life gives you lemons, and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

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

Richard wrote: NIST did a study into archiving on CD-R. I thought it cropped up here as recently as last year. Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org

In article <1141927948.14230.3.camel at crusader.localdomain.home>, David Holland <dholland at woh.rr.com> writes: Unfortunately this report really says nothing specific about how long media can be expected to last. All they say is that manufacturers claim that prerecorded (i.e. silver pressings) CDs and DVDs should last 5 years. For anything else they define deteriorating characteristics and environments but don't say anything about how long things should last. There is good information about archival storage conditions, but no information about how long you should expect things to last without having to reburn them. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

Jim Leonard wrote: ... until you find a few years down the line that your burner was producing CDs that refuse to work in any of the hardware you can now lay your hands on. The media may be ok, but it's only as good as the thing you're trying to read it in - and experience has been that there's a huge amount of incompatibility out there :-(

Jules Richardson wrote: As I said a couple of weeks ago, there's *no* archival media that's exempt from that kind of obsolescence. Archive it, TEST IT, duplicate it on different media, test *that*, and migrate often. It's possible to create a near-fault-proof data storage procedure. As most anything else, you do a balancing act between time, expense, and portability. If you're willing to put a lot of money in it, you can almost totally automate things. If you're willing to spend lots of hours soing the archival, you can do it nearly free. Making it platform-independent adds either time or money or both. Doc

At 03:22 PM 3/15/2006, Chuck Guzis wrote: To put it another way, the average office safe is rated as to how long it will keep paper from combusting, not for how long before a CD-R or DVD won't survive... - John

Doc Shipley wrote: Absolutely. What I'm getting at is CDs seem to be at the very low end of the scale in terms of compatibility - conversely things like tape, floppy, SCSI / ATAPI devices etc. seem to have far less chance of interoperability problems. Can't comment on DVD; I don't use it for anything. I could take a SCSI disk and plug it into any old SCSI HBA, or an IDE disk on an ATAPI controller, or a 3.5" floppy in a 3.5" drive, or a DLT drive on a SCSI HBA etc. and it's *almost* certain that the system could access the media. With CDROM, those chances are a *lot* less when all possible drives are taken into account (laptop drives and 'combo' drives that read both CDROM and DVDROM seem to be notoriously bad at reading non-commercial media) So you're right, refreshing often is the sensible thing to do - but despite that I'd still rather choose media that has a high level of compatibility across hardware / systems than one that doesn't, just in case. Yep. But testing - whilst obviously necessary - still can't of course provide any guarantees that the media will work on whatever hardware can be sourced at the time of needing to access it. The best anyone can do is use something that's *reasonably* likely to work, but there are no certainties. Of course knowing that there will be a backup prog around down the line that'll understand the contents of your media is another matter entirely :-) (which I suppose is why simple formats like tar are so useful - even if tar vanished off the face of the map, the format can really be inferred from just inspecting the data and it's trivial to knock together a reader) cheers Jules

I even saw a USB turntable (!) in the last issue of MacAddict for digitizing yer LPs. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- And now for something completely different. -- Monty Python ----------------