On Feb 24, 2:00*am, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:
In article
c0f1b61b-8ad7-489a-97c5-
,
* 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.

The oldest 2" quad broadcast we've played in the last 3 years was from
1969. Most reels over 30 years old require a trip through the
dehydrator of 13 hours at 135 F

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 have some 10 year old CD recordables that played fine last month - I
was a little surprised.

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.

My 10 year old CDs were burned at 2X as that was all I had at the
time.

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.


I trust flash storage least of all but I have no hard data to support
my bias.

Archiving digital is NOT a trivial problem.

G²