In article
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wrote:
My experience says magnetic tape has rather a longer life than home
burned DVDs, etc. I reckon you're lucky if they last 10 years without
developing errors.

Quite a problem, archiving. So far properly stored film seems to have
the longest life.

Magnetic tape, stored in a good environment, does have good lifespan.

Depends on what you consider a good lifetime. My earliest VHS tapes became
unusable some time ago due to oxide shedding. At I suppose about 20 years
old. Same sort of thing applies to early pro formats - assuming you can
find a working machine to play them on.

Even so, a lot of tapes are probably several years old at this point
so the remaining alternative is duping back to tape again, or another
method. We can't really know if today's DVDs will last 10 years or
not, since they've not been around 10 years and accelerated testing
tends to use perfect samples and suggests far longer.

Not my experience with home burned CDs. Have some giving problems at less
than 10 years old which was a guess figure. Commercial ones use different
media.

I would tend to trust data on a slow burnt DVD more than a CDR since
they are encased on both sides, providing they're not set in strong
sunlight a long time. Either way, a good strategy would be to make two
copies, each on different lot, different brand of media.

Trouble is you'll not know which make is best until after the problems
start.

Another option these days might be flash storage. Considering the low
resolution of VHS, videos with typical compression shouldn't be very
large, so $1/GB flash prices we're starting to see these days could
allow for reliable storage at reasonable cost (if it's worth backing
up at all, anything that can't be had on a retail DVD). In 10 years
when the flash storage retention rating has expired, flash memory will
be that much cheaper per GB.

Maybe. But anything which requires such frequent backing up isn't really
much use for archiving.

--
*Learn from your parents' mistakes - use birth control

Dave Plowman London SW
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