Article on data rot on CD's

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Wed Jul 28 13:22:23 2004

On Jul 28, 12:11, Joe R. wrote:

> The problem is that AFIK no one has found ANY CD disks that are
> reliable. Several people that have been interviewed in national
> publications explictly pointed out that they bought top quality disks
but
> they were still unreliable. In fact, it didn't appear that there was
much
> difference between the cheap ones and the expensive ones.

The other day I came across a table from a report showing the relative
longevity of data on various media (DLT, CD-R, etc) at a variety of
temperatures and humidities. I'll try and find it again and post some
of the results. Some of you might be shocked. For example, a CD-R
with an expected lifetime of something like 25 years (if I'm not
misremembering the highest figure) under ideal conditions has a
lifetime of only several *months* at higher temperatures (upper 20s C,
that would be 80s F) and humidity. DLTs fared much much better.

I have some CDs that were bought about 8 years ago because they were
supposedly good quality, and burned in a highly-rated burner. Out of
the first batch of ten, 4 are now unreadable or give multiple errors.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Wed Jul 28 2004 - 13:22:23 BST

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