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CD-R Warning, if ever one were needed.

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gordonf238 said:
and plays just as well today.

2 year lifespan. puh-lease!
Click to expand...
If you are referring to a factory-pressed CD, these are made using a completely different process than recordable CDs, with completely different recording media, and are not at all comparable.

Factory-pressed CDs are, literally, pressed, with the digital bits encoded in physical high and low points in the plastic substrate. This is then coated with a stable metallic film, which is then covered with a second layer of plastic.

Recordable CDs, in contrast, are made with organic or metallic dyes that are, by design, not heat- and light-stable. That is why the teensy laser in your CDR drive can record on them.
 
Note: The Wayne Newton Backup Method was not invented by the artist known as Wayne Newton. It is simply named in his honor. I have know idea if he would approve of this data management method.

STEP 1: Save to hard drive. Back up to large external hard drive.

STEP 2: When external hard drive fills up, unplug and go buy another.

STEP 3: Every once in a while, make DVD copies of really good stuff (only). The human brain is capable of over 100:1 data compression by being picky.

STEP 5: After a few years, you will have a handful of these hard drives. The hard drives will be puny by contemporary standards. Go by one massive drive and copy them all onto the new one. If you're feeling extra protective, mail the old drives to relatives and tell them to keep them safe in the event of your death. They will think there is something really important on them and take good care of them.

STEP 6: Don't worry that STEP 4 is missing. Life is like that.

Repeat till you die. Enjoy life along the way.
 
gordonf238 said:
i've had too many jazz and zip disks go dead on me as opposed to
CDs. i'll stick with optical media for now.

besides, in case of a nuclear blast, you magnetic guys are screwed!
:)
Click to expand...
No offence please, but in a nuclear blast, who's going to be here to view them.

--

Keith Lawrence
Perryville,Mo. USA

http://www.pbase.com/keithallenlaw

Pro1
Canon Powershot S2
Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 115 (film)

 
KenEis said:
The reliability of CD-Rs can be debated. I my business we have
about 10,000 over 5 years old and the failure rate is one or two a
year. On the other hand our old tape systems (Exabyte) had tapes
and drives fail all the time.
Click to expand...
Hi,

just my private opinion, but you got stuffed by your vendor, not tape technology, per se. Also, because you didn't say what tape technology you used, i have to add that some are not, er, prime time, by any means.

Exabyte was always third rate. I'm amazed they're still in business actually, considering the name hasn't passed the lips of any data center guy i know ever (in earnest).

Try ADIC, Sony, IBM, Spectralogic. Heck, try anyone but Exabyte. I'm out of date, sure, but i never heard of Exabyte making any big design wins.

best,
  • kirbs
 
Just by chance, i ask out of intrepid curiosity :)

I very much enjoyed reading that, Victor, though i hastily add my life consisted of Symbolics and VMS machines, so i'm a small systems guy. :-)

thanks for posting,
  • kirbs
Victor Engel said:
In 1989 I had a job as computer operator at a Metlife office. We
had a Honeywell-Bull mainframe in a computer room. For obvious
reasons, there was redundant cooling built into the room. This
consisted of 4 air conditioners mounted in the ceiling. If the
house air went out, these units would continue to move heat from
the room into the crawl space between the 6th and 7th floors.
Click to expand...
 
Wayne Larmon said:
jfelbab wrote:
Ah, sorry, you are right. It was somebody that had a similar name,
but wasn't you. The type is too small here.
Click to expand...
Wayne, if you've not tried before, try browsing with Opera. Even if some stupid kid designer set the fonts at fixed dimensions, I can just use CTRL + my scroll wheel to zoom the whole page, text, pics and all. I find this very restful for reading without spectacles. Opera also supports many user changes to site rendering if you have any specific needs. Gah! I consulted too many times for designers who insisted for dumb reasons like "it's the client who wants it like this" on fixed tiny website fonts. I was going nuts arguing against that nonsense until i discovered the user can just use Opera . . .

Even with specs on, on a high resolution laptop, i absolutely need Opera to avoid immediate eyestrain.

hope of some help,

best regards,
  • kirbs
 
They're talking about CD-R's, not factory pressed CD's. I too have plenty of old CD's. Show me a CD-R from 20 years ago which has no errors today. I challenge you... you can't.
gordonf238 said:
and plays just as well today.

2 year lifespan. puh-lease!
Click to expand...
 
At one time, Perryville was likely close enough to Soviet strategic targets, but not likely now, vis a vis the current status of forces.
keithallenlaw said:
gordonf238 said:
i've had too many jazz and zip disks go dead on me as opposed to
CDs. i'll stick with optical media for now.

besides, in case of a nuclear blast, you magnetic guys are screwed!
:)
Click to expand...
No offence please, but in a nuclear blast, who's going to be here
to view them.

--

Keith Lawrence
Perryville,Mo. USA

http://www.pbase.com/keithallenlaw

Pro1
Canon Powershot S2
Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 115 (film)

Click to expand...
--
RDKirk
'TANSTAAFL: The only unbreakable rule in photography.'
 
--
RDKirk
'TANSTAAFL: The only unbreakable rule in photography.'
 
Yes Exabyte is bad....but we also have poor reliability from DLT. Our university experience matches most large data holders. My experience is very similar to the US weather archive and NASA's experience.
--
Ken Eis
 
VincentJ said:
They're talking about CD-R's, not factory pressed CD's. I too have
plenty of old CD's. Show me a CD-R from 20 years ago which has no
errors today. I challenge you... you can't.
Click to expand...
Show me a CD-R from 20 years ago which does have errors today. I challenge you... you can't. They were first introduced in the late '80's, and didn't take off until the '90's.

By the same token, you also can't show me an Exabyte 500GB tape from 20 years ago, period.

Use the Wayne Newton method described above. Take advantage of the continuing pace of hard-disk improvement. Every year or two, buy a new drive that will hold all the stuff you've previously stored on all your other drives, and copy your stuff across, with verification. When SCSI went out of favor, I copied everything from all my SCSI drives onto one FireWire drive. When FireWire starts to go away, I'll copy everything onto whatever comes next, and so on. The great thing about digital copying is that you don't lose information every time.

If you expect any new technology to last as long as the one it replaces, you're deluding yourself. Progress is speeding up, and so is the rate at which old technologies become irrelevant.
 
About 20 years ago, I got in the habit of placing important color negatives and chromes in my deep freezer ,after sealing them in air tight containers.

Cold temperatures slow dye fading in color film a great deal.

Since CD's are coated with dyes also, wouldn't careful cold storage also extend the dye life?

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers!
 
JKirbs said:
preference to mag. tape. I currently get 500GB compressed on a
single tape - and it beats the heck out of burning DVDs.
Click to expand...
So what is your tape system, and how much does it cost? Each time I check on tape prices, they seem way high. If you're going to use magnetic media, hard disk seems much cheaper.

--
http://www.pbase.com/victorengel/

 
Victor Engel said:
So what is your tape system, and how much does it cost? Each time I
check on tape prices, they seem way high. If you're going to use
magnetic media, hard disk seems much cheaper.
Click to expand...
Hi,

this is the one:

http://b2b.sony.com/Solutions/product-detail.do?prodId=32068&pageName=B2bUnified:Home:Storage:AIT-4

about GBP £1400, or currently a lot less than a 70-200 AF-s VR, and a heck of a lot more in stock :)

(that's not a typically inflated UK price. You can calculate USD$ at parity)

if you look about, there's a lot of whitepapers on AIT tech. Surprisingly little on LTO / Ultrium and others, because i guess they're embarassed. AIT is a direct inheritor of the Betamax legacy. Not in the retail channel, but everywhere in the production game, if you get my point :)

best regards,
  • kirbs
 
JKirbs said:
Victor Engel said:
So what is your tape system, and how much does it cost? Each time I
check on tape prices, they seem way high. If you're going to use
magnetic media, hard disk seems much cheaper.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Yes, but at what spec and level are you looking? At the highest end, performance / reliabiliity, standard NBD warranty with decent engineers*, my tape drive was half the price of the smaller capacity array on my desk. If you're looking at drives sold through a mass outlet, your math will be very different, but the price differential is 1) highly negotiable** 2) largely paying for QA in the factory.

Unisys boys look after Dell gear, at least in the EU. Top people, IMO. Sony will send an army if you get a drive failure, which i know only by having raised a worry, and been patched strraight through to the IT equivalent of a SWAT team, who identified a wierd custom driver bug with Veritas. (that was almost scary, in a good way!) On the subject of support, CA rock also, i can raise the most charming and knowledgable people 24/7, and genuinely that's standard, not a big contract. (CA make & charge tons on support for EOL products they bought, Wang being the model for that, but i digress, because you only need contracts for EOL/ legacy systems)

i reckon if you announce yourself as a company purchasor, even for small stuff, you can get 30% off any internet advertised price. Dell doesn't sell AIT tape, or tries not to, because Sony is really aggressive on the VAR margin, but Dell Corporate is a (polite and open about it) sucker when it comes to quarter - end if you haggle. I don't think for a moment you lack the background to patch in to their corporate desk, or any that of any other company, to find the guys who an pen you the breaks. So much for the internet being a economic leveller :-)
  • kirbs
 
KenEis said:
Yes Exabyte is bad....but we also have poor reliability from DLT.
Our university experience matches most large data holders. My
experience is very similar to the US weather archive and NASA's
experience.
--
Ken Eis
Click to expand...
Hi Ken,

when i said "third rate" about Exabyte i was exaggerating how good i think they are, out of politeness.

I do - and freely admit this - come across as almost an advert for AIT format, but the words "we use DLT" used to cause me to break a cold sweat. There's plenty of literature out there, not just sales sheets, that will advise you of the risk that is DLT. It can be summed up - think of the problems with linear writes and flying tape at a hundred foot a second. That's what DLT does, and AIT doesn't.

If you're on a Uni project, you can get right through to almost anyone you want at Sony, and get hard info. Think of it this way - Sony has had to work witth some of the largest archive data people in industry, television and so forth being their core business, for a lot longer than many competing companies. Sorry for the bias, but they have some awesome people intimate with many other storage types, and if nothing else, you could pick their brains. Pick up the phone, even if it's for a backgrounder :)

best,
  • kirbs
 
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