Lots of folks warn about using CD-R and DVD-R for permanent archiving, because the lifespan of optical media isn’t necessarily that long. But if you are storing things on optical media that you’ll want to access down the road, it’s worth reading this article about how to choose archival media. If nothing else, it reminded me that buying super cheap CD-Rs on a spindle can be a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach.
posted January 04, 2007 by eric
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But I wouldn't take this article too seriously as it dismisses the most widely used and recommended archival disks with little evidence to support his position. There has been very independent testing of optical discs but one of the few independent tests is published by NIST and concludes:
"Samples containing phthalocyanine performed better than other dye types. In particular, phthalocyanine combined with a gold-silver alloy as a reflective layer was consistently more stable than all other types of CD-R media."
http://nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/10..
If you want the best use MAM-A Gold Archive.
http://www.mam-a.com/products/gold/archi..
Alan () - 22 01 07 - 13:24