At 5:21 PM -0500 3/5/07, Marc Myers wrote:
>It's fair to assume that none of the methods we use to retain our
>files are archival in the same way that writing on vellum would be.
>I think archiving should be considered a process not a media.
All the scientists can do is run high temperature/high-humidity
tests, but the estimated life of phthalocyanine discs is still being
pegged at 100 years.
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/arsclist/2004/01/msg000=
Message: 77.
Subject: html
The thoroughness of the paper/study from the National Institute of
Standards and Technology
http://www.film-to-video.com/study/StabilityStudy.htm that we
discussed,
http://bioacoustics.cse.unsw.edu.au/archives/html/naturerecordists/2005-09/=
msg00502.html
has been criticized, but the majority of opinions I read tonight on
the Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List recommend media
and practices consistent with the NIST test: use discs with
phthalocyanine dye on a silver or gold reflective layer burned at 1X
or 2X speed. There's been another study that reached a similar
conclusion:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Forum-Bestandserhaltung/downloads/iraci.pdf
To test which brand/batch works sympathetically with your burner, one
writer suggests getting a several brands/available batches of discs,
burning them and having them tested by a CD-R verifier. Performance
differences apparently become evident with just a few discs of each
type. This doesn't seem like too big of a chore if one is renewing
the process of re-duplicating hundreds of discs. Rob D.
> I have files I created for my wife's business in Lotus twenty-five
>years ago. I still have those files but they've been moved from the
>40 meg hard drive they were first created on to a one gig drive on
>the next computer, to a teratabyte external drive I just purchased.
>Along the way there were any number of intermediate floppies, CD's,
>DVD's and removable storage. Since all of this media is ephemeral
>you just have to keep moving it and backing up the move.
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