Re: CD Shelf Life etc.
2005-01-13 by paulhaneberg
I consider CDRs to be the most reliable medium for long term storage. I have had a number of hard drive crashes and I have seen badly shedding tape. I have even seen vinyl LPs (Yes, I'm that old) with mold growing on the surface. I have never had a CDR or CD failure. I may eventually develop the same level of trust for DVDs and DVDRs but not just yet. As many of you probably know I run a commercial recording studio based around ProTools. After every session I backup every new track and the master files to CDR and insist that my client take it home and keep it. (I do charge them for this service.) I also copy everything to a second, slower harddrive I keep for the purpose of running backups. So the data exists in three places. After clients have finished their projects I make a CDR copy of everything for safekeeping in the studio, in addition to the CDR copy the client should be keeping. After verifying that the data on the CDR is intact I then erase my ProTools hard drive and my running backup harddrive. So all active projects exist in three places and all non- active projects in two places. I keep the CDRs stored in jewel boxes in a climate controlled storage area of the studio which is usually dark and has no windows. I have several thousand. I have seen too many drive failures to keep everything archived on hard drives. If you drop a CDR it is likely to still be readable. CDRs are immune to magnetic fields. It may be possible to damage them with UV but if you keep them out of the sun and bright lights there should be no problem. I use a combination of cheap spindle mounted blanks (but major name branded) and expensive gold discs (usually Apogee or Quantegy)