dcohen_ohio wrote:
> 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 that these drives were outdated in only 8 years...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?
It's more than just how long the media will be around or readable, but
how long the particular file or disk format will continue to be
supported. This may be shorter than it seems as the data organization is
more than just that of particular software, but is tied to the OS as well.
The data format and file format used by the movie industry is not the
same formats as we would use for quality audio archiving. That they
might use the media does not give much added security.
Walt
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