Re: CDs and DVDs for archival of images.

Today Bruce Uttley commented courteously on the subject at
hand

I am about to archive images to optical media and in light
of recent debates surrounding the issue of CDs x DVDs in
terms of reliability I decided to do some research first
before choosing the media for the job.

[snip]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
has a site on the "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs". It
has a link to "Special Publication 500-252, October 2003",
a pdf titled "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs -- A Guide
for Librarians and Archivists".

This 50 page report has chapters on ensuring that your
digital content remains available: disc structure,
longevity, conditions that affect the media and cleaning.
With proper handling of the media, this report is
optimistic.

The site is at:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/index.html

IMHO, the only real alternative any of us have is to follow
the technology and continually update our backups as new,
proven stuff comes along. How many of us still have 8" or
5.25" or 3.5" disks we can't read anymore for any of a hundred
reasons?

Ditto for CD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW. They work fine today, and will
for years to come if cared for properly. And, if you use the
IT "grandfathering" method of keeping at least 3 sets, and
rotating the oldest out as the newest comes in.

It has also been debated here what the best format is for
preserving graphics long-term. It certainly is /not/ PSD or
pspimage! If, for no other reason, Adobe or Corel might be
out-of-business when you try to retrieve your irreplaceable
images. Ditto, IMHO, for RAW/NEF. What do you do if Canon,
Nikon, Adobe, whomever stops supporting your incantation?

Again, all of this is fine for today, as are TIFF, PNG, JPEG,
and others. Today, we have Macs and Windoze FAT, FAT32, and
NTFS. Who knows what there will be in 5, 10, 100 years?

But, to come back to earth, who among us doesn't have boxes
and boxes of old snap shots and 35mm slides, that they've
taken or they rescued from a relative's house? Me? I've got
8,000+ slides, and several thousand unnamed old family B&Ws
alone. My daughter says that if I don't name this stuff, she's
going to throw them away after I'm dead. And, I say - "so
what?".

I started with floppies, went to Zip Disks, then CD-R, now
DVD-R. When the next better mouse trap comes along, I'll move
along. And, these are just the musings of a fool, YMMD. <grin>

BTW, I use UDF most of the time for my optical media to get
115 character file names, up from the 64 allowed by Joliet.

But, when I got my new Windoze XP Pro SP2 box last October,
the Windoze device driver crashes almost all the time upon
loading or attempting to read UDF-formatted CDs or DVDs. And,
while not as serious, SP2 also truncates the 32-char UDF
volume names to 15.

I /know/ this problem exists, I can Google for it and two of
my most knowledgeable computer guru friends can verify it. UDF
works fine on Win 98, 2000, NT, ME, and XP through SP1. But,
Bill the Gates broke something either in the base SP2 code -
probably for his bull*** non-security - or he broke it in one
of the hundreds of "critical updates" since. Who knows? All I
know is that the MS KB has no-thing to say about it, and the
many MVPs on Usenet claim the problem doesn't exist. But, when
I Google, I can find people just like me, wandering the desert
looking for help.

Anybody on this NG know what I'm talking about? Better still,
do you know how to fix it? I have to keep my old SP1 box
until/unless I find a cure and/or continually buy more and
more external HDs, and hope /they/ will read in 20 years!

--
ATM, aka Jerry
.