[ale] [Fwd: RE: DVD burner for archival image copies]

[Geoffrey]

Interesting stats on making your cdrs last. Anyone have any similar 
suggestions/solutions?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: DVD burner for archival image copies
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 15:31:54 -0500
From: dave kleiman <dave at isecureu.com>
To: <forensics at securityfocus.com>
CC: 'Greg Freemyer' <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>,	'Jerry Shenk' 
<jshenk at decommunications.com>

We have found that there are 2 key elements in the "longevity" of CD-R's.

1. Burn speed. Everything I have read recommends never going over 8x if you
want it to last. We burn all ours at 4x. (I will explain why)

2. The coating on the CD-R.

We have personally found the Memorex CD-R Blacks are the best for us.

Our test have nothing that is older than 5 years and we have seen those very
old CD-R's fail.

During our goof-off time one of our testing procedure is this. We have a
very old Music CD player 1993-ish.  We tested all different CD's at
different speeds. Only those burned at 4x or less and FINALIZED consistently
played on that player. Some of the very cheap CD-R would not play at all.

Scratching or exposing the CD-R's to UV's makes all bets off.

Store them Cool and Dry, and if they are extra valuable reburn them every
2-3 years.

Here are to good write-ups on CD-R's.

http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2106/2106article14.htm

http://www.mscience.com/survey.html


______________________________________
Dave Kleiman, CISSP, CISM, CIFI, MCSE
www.SecurityBreachResponse.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Freemyer [mailto:greg.freemyer at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 16:30
To: Jerry Shenk
Cc: forensics at securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: DVD burner for archival image copies

I would not assume that DVD backups will have a long life-time.  I have not
seen any field tests of lifetime for DVDs, but for CD-Rom some of the
real-world testing showed they were only reliable for a year or so.

If you do any research on this, be sure to differenciate between
Manufactured DVDs and ones made in a typical DVD writer.  That was the big
difference for CDs.  Manufactured (or pressed) CDs do last a long time, it
is the burned ones that don't.

As far as I know, good tape media is still the preferred archival storage
medium, and even it is only rated for 20 years.  I guess you know a good
tape drive is still pretty expensive.

Greg


On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:29:11 -0500, Jerry Shenk
<jshenk at decommunications.com> wrote:
> Has anybody used a DVD burner to make archival copies of images on a 
> linux-based forensic computer?
> 
> What I imagine doing is dumping an image to a DVD(s) after an analysis 
> is over so that the image can be archived for an indefinite period of 
> time.  I'd think I could use something like "dd 
> if=/images/TestCase_hda1.img | dvdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -data -".  
> Obviously that doesn't work or I wouldn't be asking the question.
> 
> Once I get that working, then I'm gonna want to be able to burn larger 
> images to multiple dvds using some combination of the skip and count 
> switches...but one thing at a time;)
> 
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-- 
Until later, Geoffrey