[TriLUG] Safest long-term media

Neil L. Little nllittle at embarqmail.com
Sat Jul 11 19:10:05 EDT 2009


There have been articles over the years detailing this such as PC 
Magazine and Wikipedia has some information on it.

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

Basicly it goes like this. The longevity of optical media has been said 
to be 10 to 30 years.

There are two types of optical media. Pressed media and those using dyes.
Mass produced optical storage media, music cds video dvds are pressed. 
There is a physical imprint of the data.
The equipment to record the master are rather expensive.

The life time of these material will be at the projected maximum 
however, the cost producing short runs are pretty high.

The consumer grade versions use dyes. The type of dyes used in these 
media will determine the longevity of the media.
As far as the quality and longevity go the duration is about half.

Taio Yuden media is used in most commercial applications where longevity 
is required.
The dyes used for these media do not degrade as fast over time.

The next step down would be Verbatim and then Maxell.

Flash technology has a limited life time. There are technology solutions 
on the horizon that in the next 5 years that will improve this.

73,
Neil, WA4AZL


Greg Brown wrote:
> Any thoughts on safest long-term digital storage? I'm thinking no 
> moving parts is probably a good idea. Blu-Ray? But one chip and the 
> disc is toast. Something flash based maybe? Or maybe a USB drive with 
> raid? My camera is spitting out gigabytes of data and I'm going to 
> have to do something with all this stuff eventually.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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