Bob:

Do you have a good, wholesale supply company for your archival media that you can recommend? Also, which media are you using?

Thanks,
Duncan

In the U.S., MAM-A.

That's their name, really. I saw them at DV EXpo West last month, seemed very competent.

Yep, that's the stuff you want to get.

"That's why we use archival grade CDs, tested to last 100 to 300 years and archival grade DVDs tested to last 50 to 100 years."

I always find this kind of marketing quite comical. How can they possibly claim they will last this long when they havent been around 300 years nor will any of us be around to see if they are right. Furthermore, how can they test this? Do they have a time machine? Can they simulate world events and the enviornment in the next 300 years? What if we have another ice age? Will they still work as expected then?

That said, I think archival grades will last longer than cheaply produced products but to think they will last 300 years is ridiculous.

you know, I have some el-cheapo CD's I burned in '99 that still work perfectly fine. :)

They were in jewel cases for a while then transfered to a wallet. Honestly, I've had more problems with the shiny layer starting to chip away then data loss, ever. :D

I take it from reading their specs, the Silver are 75 year media an Gold are 300 year media. There is quite a price difference.

Duncan

tested to last 100 to 300 years

There are some standards for accelerated lifespan testing, these use elevated temperature, thermal cycling, etc.

It's still an estimate, but it's better than nothing.

DLT seems to be hanging around for a fair while so it's probably a viable option or is it at the end of its life cycle?

Very viable. Lots of new versions, with backward media compatibility. The latest, SDLT600, is pretty cool (300GB native).

Seagate is coming out with a new 500GB pushbutton external harddrive next month, "for video editing" no less.

Sony is releasing 80GB "el-cheapo" backup tape drives with SATA connectors shortly also.

Age testing also doesn't have to go all the way to the failure point. If one knows at what stage of decay the media will become unusuable, one can age the media for a shorter time such as a single year, and measure how far towards that stage it gets. Simple extrapolation will then determine the lifespan.

Not expensive at all, considering the alternative of having nothing to work with a couple of years from now.

I have some data CDs from 1998 with a lot of failure rates.

I'm sold.

Still not buying this age testing thing. Heat is not the only thing that ages things. Just simply sitting on a shelf ages things and that takes time. Plus what about normal handling. I just dont see how these tests truly represent the results. Furthermore, as i said, no one will be around in 300 years to call "BS" on these tests or to sue the companies for false advertising.

So what happens if you use their product according to their handling instructions and you lose your data because the discs fail well before the supposed 75-300 year mark. Are they going to recreate your content for you? Compensate you for your lost content? Of course not. Then they shouldnt market something will last for a time frame that they cannot prove. Thats my problem with their marketing.

pmasters, you need to do a little more research on age testing. True, it's no where near an exact science, but it is a lot more accurate and useful than you seem to think it is. Age testing has been a useful, respected, and standard industry procedure for a very long time.

I would also suggest that if one product advertises a life span of 10 years and another 300 years, while it may not be able to guarantee 300 years, you should at least feel comfortable that it will last significantly longer than 10.

**I always find this kind of marketing quite comical. How can they possibly claim they will last this long when they havent been around 300 years nor will any of us be around to see if they are right.**

Reminds me of when Kodak changed their color print process in the early '80's by eliminating a step, and marketed the product as "Century Prints", complete with voluminous documentation to support their claim that color photographs from this "new" process would last 100 years without fading. In truth, they were far less stable than the previous 3-step process, and faded to pale cyan (i.e., crap) within 2-3 years.

Which brings me to my point: Whether you use CD blanks with blue, green, or polka-dot coatings, whether they are "archival" or $10/100 throwaways, don't leave them on the dashboard of your car or they won't last 300 minutes. Only medium sure to last 300 years are stone tablets.

Patrick, there's a whole science of materials testing. Heat is NOT the only factor, UV light, humidity, Oxygen as well as temperature. All these things affect optical media. For example too high a R.H. can lead to growth of fungus, too low can cause plastics to fail as the plasticisers boils off. Temperature cycling causes thermal stress which can cause the bonds between the layers of a CD /DVD to fail letting in air.
These tests are done by certified testing laboratories, they use environmental test chambers, plot effects of changing parameters of the environment on error rates, analyse failure modes etc.
Part of the cost of high grade media is not just in the manufacture of the media but in the ongoing testing done by independant labs.
I used to be involved in tesing various bits and pieces of military equipment and I can assure you this isn't voodoo. None of the people in this business use marketing hype either, rather they rely on reports that run to many pages to sell their product. You don't find this stuff in Wal-Mart, in fact it's typically very hard to find as they supply a pretty select market.
Why is it a select market?
Well archival grade media has a number of characteristics that make it unattractive for general use. The reflective layer is pure gold, much less light is reflected than from aluminium so you get higher BLERs. But guess what, gold doesn't oxidise so that BLER stays constant over time unlike aluminium. Secondly the dye layer is thicker and more UV resistant, good thing except maximum burn speed is much lower, down to 10x on some of the media I use, hardly a big marketing point for the general public.
Much the same goes for the DVDs I use for archiving data, very slow to burn, simply will not play in a set top DVD player but they don't fade away.
Bob.

Still not buying this age testing thing. Heat is not the only thing that ages things. Just simply sitting on a shelf ages things and that takes time.

Actually, aging tests are quite scientific and, if done properly, very accurate.

We have centuries of old stuff to look at (artifacts of all different types from various ages). The science of what causes aging is very well understood and mostly involves chemical interactions, most notably materials combining with oxygen. To predict aging, you take a brand new version of some object, and then find a really old version of the same object. You then subject the new object to an environment designed to speed the chemical processes that "aged" the original object (often, but not always heat, because as we all know from high school science, chemical reactions proceed more quickly at elevated temperatures, and in a completely predictable way). At the end of the test, you compare what has happened to the new object to what happened to the one that was aged normally. You use the results to extrapolate what will happen over a longer period of time. This process "proves" the model and lets you apply the same principles to an object for which you don't have real aging data (like a CD or DVD).

If this sort of science bothers you, then don't ever read anything about astronomy, where scientists regularly measure vast distances without using a ruler, or anything about atomic physics where particles cannot be observed directly and can only be measured by effects on other objects.

I can go on, but the science of aging is pretty good.

Now, the REAL problem is the marketing hype and deciding whether to believe it or not.

My problem with the age testing is that yes, in theory, one could compare an old item against a new item. The problem I have is that it involves predicting the enviornment. In a testing lab, they control the conditions. The enviornment is uncontrollable. What I mean is that ok, lets say in 30 years, we have a climate shift to the point that temperatures rise 5 degrees. Now in that enviornment, the results would be different than they are today. Or perhaps something happens to the oxygen that changes the enviornment and its interaction with materials.

My problem is not with companies saying they produce a good reliable product but more so with blanket statements of 300 years. I remember reading a test back in 2000 about the shelf life of CDRs if handle and stored properly lasting 100 years. Now tests are showing much different results. So whats to say in 20 years, new tests show that these latest tests are wrong as well?

Wonder what the results would be for solid state storage?

don't you lvoe science? I'm sure that in some tests they account for different conditions (based on current models) but, it doesn't even really matter.... This isn't the 1940's & reel to reel tape won't be good for half a century. 5 years ago we got home DVD burners. This year we may get home BlueRay/HDDVD burners. in another 5 years we may be using 100% solid state. 5 years from that we could be using some type of bio-storage.

It's not like anything important is going to stay on this media anyway. I mean, if you've got hundreds of CD's floating around, you can compact it to tens of DVD's. Single's of blue day's. A fraction of solid state.

i wouldn't worry about any of these tests as they're all (for practical purposes) useless. :)

Plan for backup migration every 2-5 years, 10 at the most. Don't count on ANY optical medium for more than 10-15 years at the very VERY most.

i wouldn't worry about any of these tests as they're all (for practical purposes) useless. :)

If you think using gold instead of aluminum makes no difference, and carefully thought out plastics and coatings make no difference, then save your money and go with whatever is on sale at your local electronics emporium, or go online to get the cheapest CDs and DVDs made by Chinese peasants using industrial surplus previous generation machines from Taiwan.

The last part is the #1 reason industry experts list as the cause of today's poor quality media.

Btw, the MAM-A archival CDs and DVDs are made in the good ol' U.S. of A. On the latest generation machines.

I had some cheapo CDs I burnt circa 10 years ago. Transposed them to DVD last year minus one or two virusus. No problems. Spend what you want, but I doubt it matters.

i'm not saying they make no difference in the quality or life of the media, but when they came out with magnetic tape it lasted for decades (not the media but the use of magnetic tape).. they are starting to be 100% phased out within the past 10 years because there was nothing more realiable. With new media types that are better & better comming out faster & faster every few years you could transfer your data to a better, safer format so life of the media isn't as important as it was 50 years ago. And because it's all digital you won't have any loss on transfer like tape.

I have worked in the plastics industry for years. And I can assure you that a longevity of 30 years is possible and anything over that is nonsense.

JJK