Archive Quality CDR or DVDR media?

[Mark Wheaton]

I am doing a project for a museum and they want the project and the mix to go onto Archive quality Media in addition to the Hard Drive it sits on.

Each Session is about a gig and needs to fit on a DVDR. The mixes are 1/2 hour and can be burned onto CDR Media.

Are there any recommendations on officially (whatever that is) recognized archive quality CDR or DVDR media? The tech director at the museum keeps requesting Gold CD. Does any one know a vendor that specializes in this level of product?

[Tweakhead]

http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/cdr.php

[Pete Gates]

Read something, sorry can't remember where, that said that DVD+R/W (yes, R/W) was the best DVD archival medium. Seems +R +R/W has better error correction and a better laser-pit tracking mechanism than -R -R/W, can't remember why R/W was better than R.

Pete

[JFreak]

Better to buy a hard drive for archiving purposes. You can get half a terabyte for a hundred dollars so that doesn't cost any more than a hundred DVD's. It is also easier and faster to copy stuff to a hard drive, plus it is a whole lot easier to store one hard drive compared to a hundred DVD's.

Just how I see it, if you want to burn disks it's up to you.

[Pete Gates]

Hard drives can prove unreliable if left on a shelf for several years - as someone I work with has this week found to their cost. The story I've heard is that the bearings or something seize - don't know if that's true but my colleague's drives won't spin up but other ones put in same case will.

Pete

[JFreak]

Self-burnt CD/DVD media is also a wildcard when it comes to archiving stuff for "several" years. Nobody can say how long the backup disks can be relied on!

IMO, hard drives are far more reliable, they just need to be used once in every few years if one wants to have peace of mind. And frankly, because hard drives are growing bigger and faster over time, it is likely never a problem (having useful data on a hard disk drive that is too old to function).

For example; ten years ago workstations had 5GB hard drives and hard drives that old are still very reliable (if one can find proper working host computer to run them as current ones will not do). So if you have that 10-year-old backup data on a hard drive sitting on a shelf, just (find a proper host computer and) copy that to a fresh one then dump the old — copying that data over to a new half-terabyte hard drive would only consume 1% capacity, which is nothing really, and could easily fit on a USB stick as well.

Point being interfaces change over time as well, and it is a lot more important to keep up with connectivity than fear of ball bearings not being lubricated properly. What good does a perfectly working hard drive if you can't connect it to your current systems? To avoid that, you need to copy data to new storage every time your host system goes through a storage system generation transition such as SCSI-to-IDE or PATA-to-SATA.

But you're right, backups are a pain.

[Tweakhead]

AIT tape is really the best archival medium.

[Touchwood Studios]

AIT is only format I have never had problems with for archives. I use to use use CD-R (Pre-1999) I have used AIT since then.
Plus all my old AIT-1,2 tapes read and write in my AIT-3 drive.
My AIT is also fast my drive backs up and restores at 600MB per minute 100 GB uncompressed per tape. AIT 4 is even faster.
Remeber if it's not backup twice - It's not backed up.