Klas wrote:
... for an "everlasting" format, what would you recommend today?
Klas,
Here is an article from ZD Net entitled "Storage Media Lifespans".
http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/computers/storage/story/0,2000023527,
20269043,00.htm
It looks like DVD is the winner with 70 - 100 year life span closely
followed by solid state media with 50 - 100 year span. Surprisingly,
they claim cdr's are only good for about 10 years. DVD drives and
dvd media have come down in price a lot over the last year. You can
buy an internal dvd burner now for a couple hundred US dollars and
media cost around $4 per 4.7gb dvd. That's about 9 hours of wav
recordings at 44.1khz.
Your concern of whether or not there will be devices to play back
any of the media types we have today is very real. For example, I
conducted 2 years of songbird point count surveys for the forest
service in 1990-1991 and in 1999 I went to the forest service to
obtain the data but it was stored on 5 1/4" floppy discs. I must
have contacted 10 people before I found a someone that still had one
of these drives. Luckily the data was still readable but to think
that these drives were outdated in only 8 years... Since the movie
industry has latched on to dvd's, I expect they will be around for
longer than 8 years from now, but who knows?
Darren Cohen
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