Well, you have to credit Delkin for having a bold marketing department, if nothing else:

"Delkin Blu-ray (BD-R) discs are the first archival grade Blu-ray product guaranteed to preserve data safely for over 200 years."
http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/archival-blue-ray.html

It's quite a remarkable claim, so you might think it would be backed up by equally remarkable experimental evidence. But if there is any, I haven't found it yet.

I'd be a bit dubious too, their so called "Gold" BD-R disks don't even look very gold. Their Gold DVD-R (probably MAM) are gold or at least look like they're gold.

Bob.

I don't know that shelf life has much meaning. All of my DVDs and CDs are going strong. Just used a CD-R written in 1998 and it worked perfect. I am sure that I will get bombarded but I just don't see it as an issue. I have CD-Rs that I wrote for my wife in 2000 that have been in the car and used daily with no problems (90's in the summer and 20's in the winter) . Not one of my 90 or so CDs ever fails to play. Short of damage they will no doubt out last me.

In my experience, Cd's don't really seem to be an issue. It's the claims on dvd's that don't seem to be all that realistic. And now with a "200 year" claim on a Blu Ray disks I'm beginning to think they're out to lunch as well. (Although I guess they could be talking DOG YEARS)

100 years? Will there being anything around to play them? Probably some new media will be around that they have been converted to after about 20 years that will last for 500 years then another new media converted to that will last 1000 years. There will also be a thingy to collect the lost data, assemble it with a superior algorithim, and play it back on a new simulated disc with a 780 core processor.
JJK

Since marketing claims are often lies, yet personal experience indicates that both CDs and DVDs hold up pretty darn well over a few years, here is a very scientific test which you can do yourself which should let you make your own estimate.

With DVDs, you can download and run DVDSpeed, a free program from Ahead/Nero. Do a complete disc quality scan on your DVD. Note (write down) the error rate. Keep this with your disc. Then, put a mark on your calendar and do the same test a year later. This will give you an idea of the rate of decline.

I assume that similar tools will be (or may already be) available for BluRay.

The only flaw in my idea is that the quality test requires that you do it on the same drive each time. This doesn't have to be the same as your burner, and in fact since I go through burners pretty quickly, I do my testing on an old DVD reader that has been around for years and doesn't get much use.

According to my tests, if you use bad media, you may be lucky to have your media last until the end of the day. With good media, they will last longer than you will, although whether they make it to 200 years is anyone's guess. With archival media, such as the already-mentioned MAM, I would be pretty confident they would last a LONG time, if stored correctly.

I just restored audio tape from 1950, only a few years after that media was introduced to the public. It is shedding a little, and getting hard, but is still playable. I have restored 16mm film from the late 1920s, and it is as good as the day it was first projected. However, some of the acetate film stock brought to me has started to turn into acetic acid ("vinegar syndrome"). The point being that both storage, and the specific formulations used can make a big difference in longevity. It may not be possible to know, in advance, whether you have chosen correctly the brand that has that good formulation, but people have done accelerated aging tests which are scientifically valid, I think, and they do show that good CDs and DVDs are likely to last a long, long time if stored correctly.

as far as I am aware, there are no Blu-Ray drives generally available yet which report pre-correction error rates. There are quite a few DVD drives which do, and that's what the CD Speed, DVD Speed and similar programs rely on. So you need the right hardware first, before any software can report the errors to you.

The CD Freaks website (http://www.cdfreaks.com) is a good source of info on burners and media. They have all kinds of Pi/Po parity errors and other stats on DVD media, but only report the final errors (good / no good) for Blu-Ray. So you have much less useful data for analyzing BD-R quality, at least right now.

jbeale: excellent information.

interesting.... but without too much consideration i've always 'updated' my archival material at some point when it looked like the going was going to get tough. 8" > 5" > 3" > cd. most of my stuff now resides on cd's (even my first ones still play happily (stored correctly). bigger stuff is now on hd's though i'm not too happy with that since i have had hd's refuse to spin up after a few years on the shelf (except seagate drives).

i'm not going to be around in 50 years let alone 200, so what do i care ;-}

my friend who is head of nuclear sc at a major hospital here went through all the hoops about 8 years back with everyone (ibm, hp, et al) trying to sell them storage of one sort or another. they finally settled on a guaranteed format they've been using for years - micro-flitch. the technology might change, but if you've got light, you've got information....

leslie

Most large organizations around here are using Micro Fitch for archiving. My cousin is hugely busy doing this for a living. He is doing rooms full of boxes of records with huge scanners.
JJK

The term is actually, "microfiche."

Kodak's preservation gold discs are rated at 300 yrs and 100 yrs for CD-Rs and DVD-rs, respectively. This implies that the pit size does have a distinct correlation to the archival quality of the media. Now I do know that Kodak wouldn't make any such claims without the media having undergone strict accelerated life tests.

Now I do know that Kodak wouldn't make any such claims without the media having undergone strict accelerated life tests. I agree. I lived in Rochester NY for several years and observed this company at close range. They understand archival issues better than any group of people on the planet.

Kodak claims their Kodak Gold Ultima CD-R media was the best:
--
"The best CD-R media for long-term storage is KODAK CD-R Gold Ultima. It was with this media that Kodak scientists performed the most thorough lifetime estimation study of CD-R media ever documented." http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq1632.shtml

Unfortunately, Kodak stopped selling it 6 years ago: "With KODAK's announcement on January 24, 2002 that it is discontinuing its CD-R media products, it is no longer possible to place custom orders for Gold Ultima media. " http://www.kodak.com/cluster/global/en/service/faqs/faq1008.shtml
--
Kodak sold their trademark for CD-R media to "KMP Media" somewhere around 2006, and KMP is now selling "Kodak Preservation CD-R" discs, which are not made by Kodak despite the branding. KMP Media claims 300 years life for their CD-Rs, which considerably exceeds the claims that Kodak ever made. Kodak's 100+ year claim was based on published lab tests. http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Kodak.html

It's not clear to me what basis, if any, these 300 year life claims by KMP have.

Of course we will see outrageous claims from some mfgs. on disk life. If the claim exceeds peoples lifetimes, who will be around to check? Might as well say they last 1,000 years. Dosen't really matter anyway, the technology to read them won't be around. Anybody got a reader for 5.25" floppies? This analogy sounds ridiculous now, but in 25 years it won't be. And hopefully most of us will still be around then.

So far there is very limited history to tell how long burned (not pressed) media will last. I read that Kodak CD-R test and they essestially tested them for 3 months at high temps. They also had a lot of caveot language at the end of the study saying essentially, they may be wrong.

History
CD-ROM player introduced - 1983
DVD-ROM player introduced - 1997
1st CD burner introduced - ? can't even remember
1st DVD burner introduced - 2002
1st DL DVD burner introduced - 2004
1st BD burner introduced - 2006

The only media I ever had fail (not due to user error) was a batch of DVD-DLs last year that were so cheap they came unlaminated just by handling them. Im sure your BD media is not dual layer, but I would guess that DL media dramatically reduces the potential media lifetime, especially on BD, since the track pitch is half that of DVD, and the chance for mechanical failure is doubled.

God, I have a 5.25" reader that I consistantly change to new computers when upgrading on the "B" drive. I forgot how to work it. XP still recognizes it. It's a wonderment.
JJK

According to the most recent issue of Wired magazine, there is a direct negative correlation between the advancement of data storage technology and its relative shelf life.

Some highlights:

CD-ROM (5 yrs. or so)
Magnetic tape (100 yrs)
Microfilm (500 yrs)
Parchment (1,000 yrs)
Stone tablet (7,000 yrs)

I also have a working 5.25 disc drive from my first non Atari computer in 1988. I use it about once a year when someone brings one or two in to have transferred to something else. I just dig it out, dust it off and plug it in.
There is a local high end very expensive photgrapher in the area who was storing all his masters on dvd. He had a lot of them the physically separated. He finally went with the gold archive disc and has had no problems since.
With certain jobs I do, I tell my customers to have it transferred to the newest medium about every five years. Especially something like family histories, old 8 and 16 mm film. I have film I put on tape 15 years ago and the customers are now putting them on dvd.

Lynn

I transferred our family 8mm home movies to MiniDV and DVD a few years back. I am now finding out that fewer and fewer people know the names and relations of the people on the movies. As a result I'm going to have to go back and add sub-titles or a narration track for my children. Likewise we have some 100+ year old family photographs with no clue who are in the photos.

Larry

Larry,

I just finished a three-day weekend with visitors from my wife's native England. They spent several hours with us going over 4,000 photos I'd scanned from her parents' estates, identifying people who we didn't know. On my side of the family, I have 150 photos from the 19th century which we found in a drawer in our cabin in Wisconsin. I've had several older family members attempt to identify people, but we've managed to get only four pictures identified.

So, I sympathize with your plight. My solution is to make as many copies as possible and send them to as many people as possible. This morning, before our guests left, I put all the photos, plus twenty hours of spoken audio from the 1950s and 1960s, on a DVD with the request that he show them to the few remaining older relatives in England, now in their 80s and 90s, and see if they could help identify those mystery people still in the photos.

I put the labels in the file names themselves when possible, and for really long descriptions create a text file, with reference to the file name number (I start each file name with a unique number, usually in the order they were scanned, and then add the people info after that number). The reason for doing things this way is that I don't want to rely on some specific photo organizing application which might be difficult to find or run, even ten years from now, much less into the future. On the other hand, I can still read text files made on the original 1981 IBM PC, and also read the file names from every file I have ever created, so these seem to be pretty good lowest common denominators.

So, even if CD/DVD/BluRay discs DO end up lasting a long time, it won't do anyone any good if we put things on them in some obscure file format. While no one -- certainly not me -- can know the future, I think it is a pretty safe bet that the descendant technology from today's computers will likely still be able to read ASCII text and DOS/Windows/Mac file names.

Good posts about preserving who the people are in our archives of photos and movies. I like the txt file idea and the subtitles for old home movie conversions.

Im a little suprised (and glad) that at least two people still have and use their 5.25 floppy drives. In 2033 (25 years) I bet someone will be posting on here how they are suprised someone still has a CD/DVD drive that they ocassionally pull out to get some old data from.

Two years ago, I got a call to do a 50th reunion high school project. One guy said he had some photos I could start with and he would send them to me on disk.
They arrived a few days later on 49 5.25 disks - one .bmp picture on each disk. My antique had no problem reading them. Murphy's law says that as soon as I get rid of it, another one of these will show up. That and my vhs-c adapter.

Lynn