CD-R writing and quality degredation - Page 2

Isn't a hard disk drive vulnerable to EMP (via HANE)?  =P

lol

what a coincidence..i just did that right now (not the first time).  I have a cd which i bought from abroad cause you can't find it in my country,anyway..i lost it some time ago and i was so glad that i have all my cd's backed up in flac     so today i wanted to listen to it in my cd rom rig so i converted it ti wav and burned it using nero and a decent quality silverline cd. 

it sounds great!   I am sure i couldn't tell between this and the original,but it is probably at least 98% identical anyway.

So what you should do, just to be sure, is buy everything in vinyl and stock up on turntables and parts.  Preferably have a couple of grammaphones on hand too in various speeds, in case we go off the grid forever.

In all seriousness, I have several CD-Rs of unknown type (they have labels over them) given to me in 2003, and now they're almost entirely unreadable.  I never used them either; they were just a part of my FLAC ripping project this summer.

On the other hand, I have numerous Fujifilm CD-Rs that are the same age or older, and they have held up very well.  Only a small percentage of them skip at all, and I've found no cases where it can't be attributable to scratches.  Of course, who knows what kind of inaudible or semi-audible errors there are.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3602 

Yeah I used some FujiFilm CD-R's to burn a couple of disks and Ubuntu images.

So. Cool, dark place and they should hold up? How long would a USB stick (or any SSD) hold if it is left unused?

A friend of mine actually has a Gorram 19th century gramophone. You know, with a hand-crank and a huge needle and a huge flare-type thing.

I wouldn't necessarily trust them for long-term use, but I would hope they hold up for five years at least.  I'd make two copies of any critical data to be sure.

I don't know about flash memory - but I think there are volatility issues and other things that prevent them from being true archival methods.  You also run into the possibility that one tiny mistake - pulling out of a socket while reading/writing, or a power failure - could ruin all of the data.  In other words, I wouldn't trust a single copy on flash either.

Tape drives are seriously a good medium.  You can still get new ones (drives and tapes), with capacities comparable to the biggest hard drives today.  But they're expensive, slow, and if you're a survivalist, they're not going to survive an EMP without being shielded.  But long-term reliability is probably the best of all mediums short of a sealed, pressed, high quality CD from a manufacturer - or vinyl records (and punch cards!) that aren't to be used, of course.

Interestingly, I found this article about a few vinyl records from the '80s that had data recorded on them!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1852870/posts

You played it back, recording it to tape.  You then put the tape in a Sinclair Spectrum computer and the program recorded would run.  Some of them had games, and one had a rudimentary text visual thing to go with the album.

Anyway, I would back up critical stuff online just to be sure. Online data storage companies, like Amazon (my photos are on their servers via SmugMug), replace servers and hard drives often.

Also, with hard drive capacities always expanding, I'd move all your data to each new computer you get.

I always use two hard drives - one as my main one with two partitions, containing the OS and software on the first and one copy of my data on the second.  A second hard drive contains only my data, which I can then pull out and put into any computer to recover.  I don't do RAID 0 with these two because user error, viruses, and/or any other sort of system problem still affects both.  It only protects against physical failure.

This isn't my ideal setup, but it requires only two hard drives and provides a high level of security compared to the alternatives.

Actually, I believe hard drives that don't get high levels of use are appropriate for storage longer than CD-Rs are - it's not unusual for 20 year old low-use drives to still be working.  They do eventually fail mechanically, but since the storage method is magnetic they're very reliable over time (AFAIK).  Given the lower cost-per-gigabyte, a smaller hard drive may be the best 5-year storage option other than online storage.

But that gramophone - as long as someone around has a machine tool shop, it'll keep on working!

two words: pit geometry.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=7076

A CD, which suffers no read errors, ripped to WAV has zero generational loss.

A WAV burned to CD-R, assuming no write errors, has zero generational loss.

Until the media is damaged or degraded to the point of read errors, there will be zero change in information when played.

And while I'm all for storing copies of your music on HDDs, there's no use wasting space with WAV files; use FLAC or WMA-Lossless or the like.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3602 

Yeah um... Paid subscriptions?

Google is faster than complaining:  www.prismsound.com/m_r_downloads/cdinvest.pdf