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Re: Data



On Sat, 20 Sep 2003, Thomas Droege wrote:

> The tedious part of this biz is writing the data to CD.  Last night's data
> took 17 CDs and I have just finished writing them.  (11 PM in Chicago).
> Still, it is a necessary part of the project, and I don't trust using tape
> which is probably the only other viable alternative.  But who knows if CDs
> are a longer lasting archive than tape.  We will know in 20 years or so and
> I won't be here to worry about it.

There was a good article about this on slashdot.org about 2 months ago,
where a dutch magazine did some tests on cd's they burned some 5 years
ago, and they found that a high proportion was unreadable.

However, their results was a little suspect as they only ran tests on a
limited number of disks, and it also depends on how the CD's are stored.

There was in the comments an interesting mention of some people
(especially in New Mexico) who lost data due to a fungal infection (where
the fungus ate the data layer - which is organic).

> Eventually I will have a go at DVDs.  They would be much easier since it
> takes about 4-8 CDs per camera depending on the time of the year.  Thus one
> DVD would do the trick for each camera and I would just have to load 1 DVD
> per camera and go away.  As it is now I must sit there putting in a blank
> CD ever 7 or 8 minutes.  Just enough work to keep me from doing something
> else.  However, we do not yet seem to have working standard DVD archive
> software for linux.  OK, I know it is supposed to exist, but I stop reading
> when I come to "Kernel Patch".  But I think it must be close.  I hope there
> will soon be an xdvdroast.

I did do some testing with my Pioneer DVD writer on linux a couple of
weeks ago, and dvdrecord (the dvd sister to cdrecord), and I've had better
results with it than when the Pioneer was installed in a W2K box - the
main factor was it didn't eat any DVD-R's (where W2K ate most). Still not
certain on the longevity yet, but so far the linux burned DVD-R's are
outlasting the W2K ones...

> Tom Droege

Peter

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Peter Mount
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