Archival Gold DVDs

Given that many people have 4x players, these extra speeds are only useful if you are maintaining the items for yourself. And then if you do extra speed, don't use the top speed. Many times lifespan of discs deteriorate faster with higher speeds used. Most important rule of thumb, keep at least two copies of all data at all times.

I have burned a few archival dvds but at slower speed. The things are expensive and I don't want to get frisbees. So far so good and they seem to work. My oldest ones are only a few years old, however.

There are also 'archival' blu ray disks. I haven't seen 50 gb but 25 gb are available. They are expensive-- around 20 dollars for one disk. I use an external blu ray burner. I have burned data disks but not with archival blu ray media.

Of course the problem is-- what if these dvds or blu rays do work in 20, 30, or 50 years? How much of your data will you be able to open from them?

I wish I had kept my original Mac 2 ci. I have kept all my other old computers. Last time I checked, the 2 ci, that I'd bought in 1990, was still occasionally getting used by kids in the family that I gave it to.

The point is, I no longer throw away (or sell) my old computers and hard drives! I don't count on anything working in the future but at least there is a hope if I desperately need to recover something, that I did a long time ago, and find that my archival media is no longer readable either because of degradation or obsolescence. I also keep current back ups of everything.

I'm primarily interested in archiving photos, family movies, and text documents. I try to save stuff in formats that may still be around in 20 years, and I keep track and update the formats to newer versions if necessary. I also produce hard copies of my most important family photos from the inkjet printer.

For long term archives, I guess I'd try to open everything on your archive media every few years and make sure nothing has become obsolete or degraded.

Sorry I got sidetracked, but archival media is only part of the solution if you want to access your stuff decades from now.

Of course the problem is-- what if these dvds or blu rays do work in 20, 30, or 50 years? How much of your data will you be able to open from them?

That's the real gamble. No one has a crystal ball. While the discs may survive, drives that are able to read them may not be able to last that long, or the energy standards may change so drastically as to make them completely obsolete. The U.S. Library of Congress is faced with many difficult issues with keeping all digital media usable.

Just has to survive long enough so that the LP to CD, or 8mm movie or VHS can be converted to the next medium.

Maybe you have to just plan to reduplicate at some point.

We use to write to two tapes in case one failed or was defective which use to happen.

What was available 25 yrs ago again?

1985, we barely started having hard drives.

Perhaps the oldest human archived items are cave petroglyphs found in the Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka, and the Daraki-Chattan rock shelter-- these are probably at least 300,000 years old. I'm not sure if homo sapiens or some other kind of pre-folks did these. Then we have other rock art which evolved and continued through the Etruscans, Greeks, Romans etc., along with paintings starting tens of thousands of years ago at places like Lascaux in France and Altimira in Spain, and elsewhere on the planet. Also people invented metal and pottery. Then the Chinese started doing stuff on paper which caught on elsewhere, and Guttenberg did his printed bible, and Senefelder invented lithography (which had huge mass distribution consequences) and Niepce helped invent photography in the early 19th century. . .

Bottom line-- (properly preserved) petroglyphs, cave paintings, or art or photos or printing on paper, may all be superior as archival media-- I'd take any of these over digital media. Perhaps we should start carving ones and zeroes onto secluded cave walls. And don't forget to print your favorite photos.

"we" I guess you mean consumers and the personal or microcomputer, not we as the industry.

I was thinking of industry and early IBM systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarlyIBM_diskstorage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historyof_hard_diskdrives

The following is the genealogy of the current HDD companies:

* 1967: Hitachi enters the HDD business.
* 1967: Toshiba enters the HDD business.
* 1979: Seagate Technology[77] founded.
* 1988: Western Digital, then a well-known controller designer, enters the HDD business by acquiring Tandon Corporation's disk manufacturing division.[78]
* 1988: Samsung enters the worldwide market, previously having manufactured Comport disk drives for the Korean market.[79]
* 1989: Seagate Technology purchases Control Data's HDD business.
* 1990: Maxtor purchases MiniScribe out of bankruptcy, making it the core of its low-end HDDs.
* 1994: Quantum purchases DEC's storage division, giving it a high-end disk range to go with its more consumer-oriented ProDrive range.
* 1996: Seagate acquires Conner Peripherals in a merger.
* 2000: Maxtor acquires Quantum's HDD business; Quantum remains in the tape business.
* 2003: Hitachi acquires the majority of IBM's disk division, renaming it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST).
* 2006: Seagate acquires Maxtor.
* 2009: Toshiba acquires Fujitsu's HDD division.[80]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harddiskdrive

I'm just an artist and mac pro user. I'm not an industry guy.

If I was industry, perhaps I'd try to develop a way of writing ones and zeroes so the ones and zeroes were reasonably permanent, and I'd try to bond this coded message with sufficient integrated physical delivery resources so the original content could be deciphered and reproduced in the future. Currently we have the digital media, which is usually transient, and which relies on non permanent third party software and hardware, (that are also not likely to be around for very long), to deliver original content-- almost seems like the antonym of archived.

An archival dvd may be able to retain ones and zeroes longer than a hard drive, but that may not matter because of the media's parasitic dependency on external readers, computers, and software.

Your hard drive history is interesting. Apparently IBM invented them in 1956 so the technology is 54 or 55 years old. I wonder if they will be produced for another 10 years or if they will be replaced largely with something else by 2020.

a brody wrote:

Of course the problem is-- what if these dvds or blu rays do work in 20, 30, or 50 years? How much of your data will you be able to open from them?

That's the real gamble. No one has a crystal ball. While the discs may survive, drives that are able to read them may not be able to last that long, or the energy standards may change so drastically as to make them completely obsolete. The U.S. Library of Congress is faced with many difficult issues with keeping all digital media usable.

They don't have to last 20, 30, 50 years. They just need to last until the next form of media comes out. Floppies were archived to CDs, CDs were archived to DVDs, and now DVDs are archived to BD-R.
You must remember that the media has to be compatible with the current computers. It wouldn't do you much good to have a floppy that lasts 50yrs, when you can find a computer to put it in.

As for burn speeds for archiving, the slower the better. The burner in my G4 only went down to 4x so I would regularly use my son's iMac to burn archival copies since I could do it at 1x. It also allowed me to keep working on my computer while his did all the slow work.

The problem with this strategy of transferring to the next form of media is it may stop working after a while, or at least that has been my experience. It often isn't "lossless" and at worst such transfers can result in total irrecoverable loss. Currently, retaining information digitally seems (to me) to be less durable than, say, printed paper.

I've never had a problem, as long as the burn is slow, the media is a quality brand, and it's stored properly.
If you burn at 32x on cheap media and let it bounce around the back seat of your car, then you'll have issues.
The only issue I've ever had was in my early years when using "on sale - no name" media... a practice I've never repeated. I use Verbatim exclusively for daily use and their "Gold grade" for archiving.

I'm reading your most recent comment and your previous one, and I'm wondering if you've actually tried copying legacy floppies to optical media, or if you have only dealt with optical media. Your most recent response only seems to only address optical media.

I don't know how old you are, but I've got some expensive font floppies from around 1990 that are totally worthless. I tried to copy them to cds, starting about 15 years ago, and it hasn't worked. They're dead. To this day I haven't had the heart to throw them away because of all the money I spent on them. Monotype Columbus alone was around 250 bucks and that was 20 years ago.

I don't think digital media is durable, especially over longer time frames. Any suggestions on how to bring my old expensive floppies back to life? I've been trying to restore them since around 1995, and they weren't even old back then. They are now.

1985 was a good year.. thats when I got into TI-99/4A and its still working to this day, networked with my MAC PRO and transferring files back and forth using a USB to DB 25 Female adapter..

1985 was a year of simple technology.. now its all but gotten so complex 😟

I wish I could take my mac pro back in time to 1985 and remain there...

1985 was a good year..

But you're 23 years old, +aren't you+ ???
That would mean that you were born, hmmmm, get the math correct, 1987?

Broke my heart in school when we had to switch from punch cards to fortran. I was never as good with fortran and I've long since forgotten it. Only got a C in that class. I impressed the girls with my HP 35. Winters were colder back then too-- one time the 10 K Turkey Day Races started at 40 below. Froze my ear lobes.

Perhaps I should ask as a new topic, but any opinions about "archival" blu ray media compared to dvd? I've been using some blu ray disks that are LTH- type that are supposed to be more durable. Are they? Do blu ray and dvd disks need to be "gold" in order to be "archival?"