archival cd-r - really true?

[Jules Richardson]

Richard wrote:
> In article <44102647.2020901 at yahoo.co.uk>,
>     Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>  writes:
> 
>> Personally I wouldn't use any flavour of CD technology for anything.
> 
> What would you use, then?  Some people recommend 9-track or other
> magnetic media (like hard drives) because the magnetic domains are
> supposedly more stable than CD-R pits.  I just haven't seen anything
> more than "a friend told me" variety stories, though.

I tend to use both hard disk and tape (DLT these days, DAT tapes seem reliable 
enough, but I got fed up with the drives going bad on me).

The thing that bugs me about CDs is that I've seen so many incompatibilities 
between media and drives - I wouldn't want to get x years down the line and 
find that the discs that I wrote on long-dead hardware refuse to read on 
whatever hardware I can lay my hands on at the time. Sure, you can test discs 
in a few different machines - but the incompatibility rate is just too high to 
give me peace of mind.

I've never had that problem with disks and tape drives - a tape written on one 
system will work happily in a drive on another from a totally different vendor 
IME, or a disk will happily plug into a SCSI bus on a different machine and 
work etc. [1]

[1] Actually, I did have a problem a few months back where a Quantum disk 
refused to share a SCSI bus with a Seagate drive until I'd patched its 
firmware - but in a data restore scenario I *could* have put it on its own 
SCSI bus if I absolutely had to.

I've just been reliving CD horrors these last few days actually, so it's 
something of a sore point at the moment - as I avoid CDs as much as possible I 
hadn't used either of my two burners in several years, but needed to burn a CD 
to boot on a floppy-less laptop. *both* of my burners seem to have died whilst 
in storage, and a borrowed laptop with a burner on it refused to burn CDs that 
would work in anything other than a select number of machines regardless of 
media tried (needless to say, it refused to write a disk that would work in 
the laptop I absolutely *needed* it to work in!).

Luckily I sourced a couple of SCSI burners that were being thrown out locally, 
and one of those has done the job quite happily :)  Still, served to remind me 
just why I don't like the darn things...

I suppose if the data is critical, small enough in size, and the media is 
available at sufficient quality, go for the coarsest grain media you can get - 
e.g. 9 track or floppies, say. At least that way if something *does* happen 
there's more chance you can get the data off the media using recovery tools.

cheers

Jules