[ale] Cd-r life

[Michael Trausch]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Paul Cartwright <ale at pcartwright.com> wrote:
> On Sat October 2 2010, Michael Trausch wrote:
>> Better safe than sorry. I reburn all critical backups after between 18 and
>> 24 months. Some discs, the dye will begin to disintegrate, or at least used
>> to. I don't trust the things for more than 24 months, period.
>
> well, as far as backups go, most things get re-backed up on a regular basis
> anyways, and anything over 2 years old is.. mostly old anyway:) and I've
> switched to backing up on DVDs, since you can get 6 times the data on them..
>

I will periodically burn "archive" disks.  These days, I have only
two, and both of them are on BD-R media.  I'm not sure what the
lifespan of the media is, but I do presume that it is at least that of
CD/DVD media, and as such plan on reburning those discs every other
year.  My strategy for some of the really old data that I want to
retain is to keep them on multiple, geographically distributed copies
that are refreshed every two years.  I've been doing that with CD and
DVD media for years now, and the only thing that I am changing is
using two BD-Rs instead of many, many DVDs and CDs.  :-)

   --- Mike