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Re: Anyone use or own their own CD printer?



Putting on my other hat ... I have some bad news, Richard, about those
lovely gold Mitsuis ... they don't last.

An unpublished report that came out of NARA (unpublished because it
was so controversial!), found that the gold CDs all of us had been
touting for years suffer the same bit-rot as everything else and the
longevity is nowhere near what has been claimed in the past. The
lifespans are closer to 10-15 years IF EVERYTHING IS PERFECT
STORAGEWISE...

So, what to do? For one thing, you could start burning an checksum
file with each CD master you create. Check that file once per year and
at the first time it hiccups, duplicate that master to another gold
CD. Basically, we are talking about "forward migration" of your
digital data on a regular basis to avoid totally losing the content.

The other option is using RAIDs to store the files on hard drives,
again making sure to monitor your checksum files for any signs of
degradation or change.

It ain't rocket science; it's archival science and yeah, I happen to
also be a trained archivist, when I'm not looping.

Best,

Dennis


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:28 PM, richard sales <richard@glasswing.com> 
wrote:
> Always master to gold Mitsui CDRs:
> http://www.mediasupply.com/cd-r-media-mam-a.html
> The best!  Plus, they last 100-300 years... handy if you happen to be
> immortal. OR VERY young.
> Copy to duplicator HD from gold CD.

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