As far as cassette decks I think you wouldn't go wrong with a Tascam 122
MkII - they are tanks.
Develop a regime of cleaning the heads periodically, more frequently if the
tapes are in poor condition. This is of prime importance - high frequency
loss is significant when the tape heads are packed with oxide.
As for CD-R: I recall loss of reflectivity in the aluminum layer has been
called out as a contributor to failure. Mitsui (now called MAMA) used this
to market their gold-reflective-layer discs.
Since we're dealing with a composite medium composed of polycarbonate,
chemical dyes, adhesives, and metal film, it seems logical that the storage
environment would have an enormous effect on their longevity.
Personally, I've moved to hard drive based archive, two copies stored in
separate locations. They will be copied to new media every few years.
Sound is stored as PCM broadcast wave. Since hard drives are so large, the
labor involved in re-copying them periodically is much reduced as compared
to optical discs.
-jeremiah
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:26 PM, John <> wrote:
>
>
> --- In <naturerecordists%40yahoogroups.com>,
> Dan Dugan <> wrote:
> >
> > > --- In
> > > <naturerecordists%40yahoogroups.com>,
> Dan Dugan <dan@> wrote:
> > If you're going to make this argument in public, I'm going to ask you
> > for better back-up than suspicion.
>
> The study linked in the first article was done by a group of storage
> experts in the 90's. The original study link was now dead. The conclusion of
> the original study group was that CD-R's were not as archival as claimed by
> the companies who made them. I remember when it came out. As to why they
> failed, does it really matter? They are subject to scratching, materials
> defects, etc, even in the highest standards of manufacturing. Like floppies
> before them, they have an achilles heel, as do all storage media. The
> queston is which is the most suited for archiving your data?
>
> Nobody can give me a definitive answer as to how long a CD-R will last.
> However, almost all the serious tech people I know don't funadmentally trust
> them. By the way, I was trying to give an understated response when I said,
> "I suspect dye failure". I know why CD-Rs fail.
>
> I have archived my personal and business data for almost 30 years. I have
> terabytes of it. Putting them on CD-Rs is totally impractical for me, and
> given the lack of rock solid information on how long they will last, I will
> continue to put my trust in the stack of redundant hard drives I own.
>
> I use the Black-X drive and my raid1 server both on and off site. As
> mentioned earlier, I will continue to be suspicious of CD-R longevity.
>
>
>
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
jeremiah moore | SOUND |
http://www.jeremiahmoore.com/
"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause
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