[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks.

[Kevin]

I've got several burned CD's from 1996 that still work fine.  On
the other hand, i've got several DVD-R's from last year that you
can tell that, just from visual inspection, they will not work. 
I've even seen pics of a CDR destroyed by a bacteria that eats
the dye.  Scary stuff.

Nothing scientific about it, but my assumption is that some of
the older media is better (when blank CDRs were ~$20 a pop) were
made a bit better than the nickel each CDRs we have today.

As we all know, it is certainly not infallible, but i trust
magnetic tape more than most backup medias.  

/KRM

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 10:12:55 -0400
Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 12:15:00AM +1000, Scott Howard wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 08:31:26AM -0400, James wrote:
> > > I never trust anything to anything. The odds of recovering
> > > data from a tape backup set is inversely proportional to
> > > the level of desperate need of the files. I've seen RAID go
> > > away. I've seen fire wipe out replicated storage devices.
> > > The technology that I trust the most (but not fully) is
> > > optical,
> > 
> > Perhaps you should read http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7751
> > 
> > Most WORM drives are more reliable than CD-Rs, but the point
> > remains that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket,
> > regardless of what it is.
> 
> I'm not saying it's impossible, but I've had a lot of CD-Rs
> last a lot longer than 2 years.  I suppose that could be why my
> NetBSD/sparc CD stopped working after awhile though.
> 
> Besides, I'd hope I wouldn't desperately need a two year old
> backup. That would imply that I've lost 2 years of work!
> _______________________________________________
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