“Phil and Dave’s Excellent CD – the beta version.”  That’s when I started using CDs, then burning them, and then  DVDs and BluRays. (“Phil & Dave’s” was the first data CD, released by Apple in 1989 (I believe.) I still have my copy around here somewhere. As a multimedia developer, I have since burned 10s of thousands of CDs and DVDs, and have therefore, pretty much seen it all…

Today (well, for the last couple of days actually) I’ve transferred from CD/DVD (243 of them) to a hard drive, 43,549 images taken between 1996 and 2011. Some of those CDs are more than 10 years old.

Why mention it?  Well, for one thing, you need to “refresh” the storage of digital media. Not only is the media itself subject to change over time, but the technology is as well. (Can you still read a Syquest drive? Jaz?) So, the price we pay for perfect duplication/reproduction (sans “generational loss”) is vigilance.

Second to point out what a tedious, boring task it is.

Third: the reward is 15 years of photos on a single, indexed, cataloged drive… instead of 243 discs, loosely gathered in containers.

But more important to my gentle readers (who know I don’t post stuff just to hear myself talk) is this:

I had only one disc that wouldn’t read. After 10-12 years. 1/243. And then this: I got the data off it anyway. I keep older CD reader/burners around just for that, and that one disc read perfectly in an older ATA Pioneer unit.

The point is that it was not the media… it was that my current drives couldn’t read that older burn.

I did have about 8 (out of 43,000) files) that gave me I/O errors, and were lost. Fortunately, I have other copies of those images, so that wasn’t an issue… but I learned something from that as well: every one of those 8 errors occurred on a RITEK RiData disc.

Before I discovered Tayio Yuden, I was enamored of Ritek for a while. It didn’t take me long to learn the error of my ways, but that was after I’d burned those backups. That came back to bite me, although without drawing any blood.

So: to what do I attribute my success? Choose the right media (Taiyo Yuden, Verbatim DL, Kodak BRay). Choose a highly rated burner (reviews of  hardware are available online.)

Get media that has a “white, inkjet printable” surface, even if you’re not planning on printing on it, because the fragile part of a CD/DVD is the top, not the bottom, and the extra layer of “paint” on the surface helps protect it (not to mention that it keeps them from sticking together as well.)

How do manufacturers ship the discs to you? Flat, in a cake box. Store them the same way. Simple. Keep them in a nice environment that is dark and relatively cool, and dry… gee: sounds like a shelf in my closet…  Bingo!

Handle them by the edges. No: they’re not that fragile, but hey, it’s not hard to do, so why not?

And for gawds sake, don’t put sticky labels on them. Sheesh.

Any media exposed and not contained in a shell is fragile and if you abuse it, you’ll lose it.

Like most of you, I’ve been exposed to all the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)  about optical media by “pundits” online, but the simple fact is this: user recordable optical is less than 15 years old, and the bottom line is still nobody really knows how long it will serve as a reliable backup, and the FUD is really just a guess.

OTOH, here I am, with 43,549 files recovered from 243 discs dating back to the dawn of (CD) time.

So there’s what I know… and it’s not a guess.

As always, YMMV.

OH: do I recommend using optical media? Sure. At least two or three backups of each. And a hard drive. What I don’t recommend is putting all your eggs in one basket.  Maybe next time, I’ll go into some detail about my ingestion workflow (which has multiple backups built into it…)