Re: [ARSCLIST] Recommended CD-R's (and risks associated with their use)

[Tommy Sjöberg <tommy.sjoberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for re-iterating, but if you've read the 
UNESCO paper several postings have already 
pointed to:

"Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs 
and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival 
Collections - Strategies and Alternatives", by 
Kevin Bradley (can be downloaded from 
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en, search for the 
title)

you would realise that there is no good CD-R's 
without a good CD-R burner. And contrary to 
disks, burners don't have any standards to comply 
with as long as they burn disks. To establish 
some sort of baseline for burners , they have to 
be individually calibrated against a known 
entity, and such known entities cost a lot of 
money. Burned disks also need to be measured for 
error levels, since a low level from the start 
means a longer life expectancy.

Hence, to summarise the paper - if you can't 
afford to have your burner calibrated, you can't 
afford long term storage on optical disks (access 
copies is a whole different matter).

Tommy Sjöberg
Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research
Stockholm, Sweden



> Among archivists (whose main concern is 
> long-term survivability), Mitisui (MAM-A) Gold 
> CDs are generally preferred, if not standard. 
> They're usually used as a back-up to a hard 
> drive system, and best practice dictates to 
> store them something like 50 miles away from the 
> hard drive.  I recently bought a ton, and I 
> found that (a) prices vary a lot, so shop 
> around, both among 'archival' supply companies 
> and audio suppliers; and (b) it pays to buy 
> un-boxed, and purchase jewel cases separately 
> (incidentally, full-size jewel cases are also 
> often preferred for long-term storage; stay away 
> from the slim cases, and most sleeves).
>
> And, as people have said, nix on the paper 
> labels if your major concern is longevity.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Christie Peterson