DVDs / Data Storage

[raddtunes]

Each Monday, I read a memo sent out by Roy Williams - - became familiar with him because I do jingle work, and try and keep up on the advertising biz.

 

His Monday Morning Memo has the following to say about DVD's that we burn at home. I burn my jingle files to DVD for storage. They aren't precious or anything, but it's nice to pull out a file if i'm doing a re-sing, or if I want to do a knock-off of an older project.

 

So - - any comments on the following would be appreciated.

 

 

Homemade DVDs last only 6 to 8 years. And the faster your burning speed, the shorter the life of your DVD.

 

Six to eight years? That cant be true. I bought a Dances With Wolves DVD back in 1996 and it still plays fine.

 

Mass-duplicated DVDs are made using an entirely different process known as glass mastering thats viable only when making a large number of copies.

 

Oh, you bought a "gold" DVD so you think your photographs, videos, important documents and creative work are safe?

 

UPDATE: When the information on DVDs began to disappear, we assumed the reflective backing was becoming tarnished so "gold" DVDs were introduced because gold doesnt tarnish. But these gold DVDs are degrading just as fast as the silver ones.

 

The tarnishing of the reflective surface was only a small problem. The big problem is the fading of the laser-sensitive ink in the sandwich layer between the clear plastic and the reflective surface. Remember when fax machines used rolls of thermal fax paper and the faxes they made would fade after a year or two? Same problem.

 

 

 

[OldTuna]

Remember when the record companies assured us that, not only would CD prices come down after the intitial tool-up and all that but....they also told us other fairy tales, too. Such as: CDs don't skip and that they would retain their information long into the future. Well, I guess "long into the future" is about 6 to 8 years. Bastards.

[ITGITC]

Kanker has DVDs that he burned 25 years ago that are still going strong.

[The Real MC]

I stopped believing anything from the record companies years ago.

 

I got CD-Rs dating back ten years that are fine.

 

The "sky is falling" scare tactics are getting old.

[ProfD]

Marketing mumbo jumbo used to sell more blank DVDs and storage devices.

 

Cop a 1 TB external hard drive. Save those DVD files to it.

 

5 years from now, buy a bigger external hard drive. Rinse and repeat at regular intervals until "the end".

 

Eventually, we'll die with a 100 TB hard drive containing music, pictures and other files left for loved ones to cherish.

 

Two generations later, that 'old hard drive' will hold up the end of a table or be erased and filled with children's music and videos.

[kanker.]

Kanker has DVDs that he burned 25 years ago that are still going strong.

All of them from when Tom had that "other" occupation...

[NoahZark]

I remember when we were told that commercial CDs would last only 8-10 years. I bought my first collection of CDs in the summer of 1987. I even remember the albums that I bought when I first made the transition, since I wanted to start with more than one:

 

Pink Floyd The Wall

Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

The Smiths The Queen Is Dead

R.E.M. Murmur

Iron Maiden The Number Of The Beast

 

 

All of them are still fully playable 22 years later. Then again, I listen to everything on my iPod these days, so it doesn't really matter anyway (which is my way of agreeing with everything ProfD says!).....

 

Noah

[ITGITC]

Wait. I thought that glass CDs (storebought) would last practically forever. The ones that are rumored to have problems are the home-grown variety. Right?

 

Well, I've moved from using CD/DVD as a backup medium to using old hard drives that I've removed from my computers and put in cases with a USB interface. They were lightly used drives, so I think they're fine.

 

But just to be sure, I also use a 1TB WD external drive. So my data is backed up twice and on different drives. That's 3 copies; 1 internal, 2 external.

 

Also, Noah - doesn't everybody use MP3s now? I don't buy CDs anymore (unless Amazon.com doesn't have what I want in the MP3 format). I just don't have the room to store all those disks.

 

And Mr. Kanker - did they even have DVDs 25 years ago? Cleaning up my studio yesterday I came across some 5.25" floppy disks. I tossed them before my kids saw them and asked me what they were. I figure one day I'll throw away my 3.5" floopy disks and my cassette tapes...

 

 

Naaaaaaaaah.

 

[kanker.]

Pork's in the slow cooker Tom. Yeah, I know I gotta get a smoker, but I got a mean NC style sauce happenin' man....

[ITGITC]

Pork's in the slow cooker Tom. Yeah, I know I gotta get a smoker, but I got a mean NC style sauce happenin' man....

 

Damn...

 

And I'm sittin' here with a SlimJim & a RC Cola.

 

http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kitchen/blog/rc-cola-blog._V27566460_.jpg

[kanker.]

I have a non-alcoholic beer waiting for me - room temp.

[J. Dan]

I display all my data in digital format and print out the 1's and 0's. Then I chisel them in a stone pyramid that I'm building in the back yard. So far, I've got about 110 bytes done, so I'm falling a bit behind. If it weren't for this damn hand injury, I'm sure my backup would be up to date. Oh yeah, and I've got a Rosetta stone just in case digital formats change in 1000 years.

[NoahZark]

Tom:

 

I think I'm one of the few holdouts still buying physical CDs. I buy the CDs because I like to truly "own" my music and not have to worry about DRM and the like. It also becomes my "built-in backup," because it's already stored in a permanent, safe medium from the moment I load it onto my computer. Sure it takes up space, but what's a basement for? Okay, stupid, I know, but it works for me, what can I say?

 

And I may be wrong about hearing back in the day that commercial CDs would only last 8-10 years, but that's what I remember. Maybe it was just rumor. It has been a long time, however, so there's really no accounting for my memory at this point.

 

Noah

[NoahZark]

P.S. Ain't nothin' wrong with a Slim Jim and an RC Cola! Royal Crown is the king of colas, after all!

 

Noah

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

One of the many important things is the quality of the disks. When everyone was buying all the cheap DATs I did too, and I learned my lesson... the cheap DATs were crap and lost info quickly. The good quality DATs held the info far longer than their proposed lifetime.

 

So when CD burning came along, I paid attention to the media. Glenn Meadows is a friend, and he ran tests, and kept us all apprised of the media quality. I was early into CD burning.... I got my machine when they were $3k, you had to hook them up to a SCSI card and trouble shoot the setups yourself, and blank disks were $27 each. I really got going when they dropped to $23 each. The accelerated aging tests done on the media led me to choose media with a +100 year lifespan. But at that time there were only a handful of burners (like, three or four)that were considered acceptable to the pro audio industry, and all if them had a 1x option, which was the preferred choice for audio.

 

Anyway, I've been archiving media for a couple of years now. My CDs put onto good media still play as well as they did when they were new in the early 1990s. Cheaper disks don't fare as well.

 

DVD? I don't know of any reputable testing for the media, and I'm sure that this is mitigated by the quality of the burn. I'm putting the data down onto two disks, and will be storing them in separate buildings in separate parts of the country.

 

Which brings up another issue... how much of this stuff is really worth keeping, and who is going to spend their time cataloging what is there and figuring out what is what?

 

I've always been a slash and burn kinda guy...comes from learning to record with limited available analog tape tracks... you don't maybe keep a take, it either sucks and needs to go, or it is good and you keep it. And once all the takes have been mixed, the multitrack is usually bulk erased and used by the next project, tape being $200 to $300 per 15 minute reel. There might be 7 or 8 or more 'final mixes' on 2 track, but those big reels go back to work.

 

All that changed with digital multitracks and now recording in the computer. Everyone thinks that every note that dribbles from their fingers or slobbers down the windscreen contains golden truths to be saved for posterity. As I said, for a couple of years now I've been wadding through stacks of RTR in multiple formats (a lot of 1/2" 8 track, 1/4" four track), and stacks of DA-88 and ADAT as well as CDs filled with multitrack and 2 track work, and even some cassette, multitrack cassette, double-speed cassette, and it will all be saved to DVD AFTER I dump it into Sequoia and throw 99% of it away.

 

Sometimes I just think that we're spinning our wheels with all this saving of data. None of us appears to be releasing the archives to public acclaim. If they didn't give a darned the first time, they aren't going to care later.

 

Another thing that I learned from Glenn... you don't want the liability of claiming to be the repository for data for a client. Let them be responsible for it. What I have here is a small mountain of data, but given the years that the studio ran and the amount of music that we recorded, it is almost nothing. Because I made it a point to either charge the client for media and pass it off to them, or make them understand that I could not be responsible for it.

 

So if you throw most of it away, you won't have that much to worry about.... might not even fill a single DVD.

[Joe Muscara]

I still buy CDs, especially when I'm at a show and like the band. It's cool to say, "hey man, love your stuff, here's $10 for that CD you got there."

 

I'm also trying to keep a local record store open, fortunately not all by myself. They actually seem to be doing okay, they're usually busy. They do in-stores of local artists all the time, as well as lesser-known touring acts.

[NewImprov]

I have a non-alcoholic beer waiting for me - room temp.

 

I dunno, that sounds like some version of hell to me

[Skinny]

I may be taking this off topic here, but I feel like chiming in...

 

My "day job" is working in a video transfer lab - I convert videotapes and old movie film to DVD.

 

Back in the days of movie reels, you had 50 ft of film (about 3.5 to 4 MINUTES running time) to use, so you had to use a little more discretion about what you filmed. People shot a little bit of Christmas, a little bit of a birthday party, a little bit of a family reunion, and of course a parade. And all of this fit on a 4 minute reel.

 

But relating to what Bill said above, people have WAY too much media storage space available now. It started with VHS, where you could potentially fit 8 freakin hours of a Christmas gathering on one tape. Now, hard drive camcorders are allowing people to shoot like 60 GIGABYTES of video, usually boring vacation scenery shots, with shaky image quality and pointless zooming in and out. Then they get sassy with me when they bring their camcorders and ask me to convert their footage to "one DVD", and I tell them it will have to go to 15 DVD's, and they bitch about the price.

 

People shoot way too much video that they'll never sit down and watch. They are always so concerned about the quality of our transfers, but usually their videos are so poorly shot to begin with. I wish I could tell them "Shit in, shit out, people".

 

Well shot, well-lit video looks good when encoded to DVD. DVD MPEG encoding can suffer when you never have proper lighting and never hold the camera steady.

 

OK, sorry for the rant. Just had to vent a little.

[Mizu]

I think this is an important topic, as it affects how we back up, and many good points have already been made.

 

Even harddisks invariably die, and the bigger the storage density the bigger the risk that a physical defect wreaks havoc on a significant part of your data, so I always store stuff in multiple places. My big concern is backwards compatibility - Like Bill I have DV tapes, 4 track tapes, DAT tapes, 8'', 5 1/4'' and 3 1/2'' disks and no longer have the equipment to read them, let alone software that understands the file formats if its something digital. I used Cubase until a few years ago, and every once in a while I come across an old sequencer file that I can't transfer into my current environment.

 

My assortment of disk collection has grown to around 4 TB, including a 1 TB RAID 5 array for the critical stuff. 1 TB is reserved for TimeMachine backups from my Mac (the one great backup solution), and every once in a while I will image my system disk to one of the external drives. But I can see that tapering down in the near future. If you have the upload bandwidth consider cloud storage, like Amazon's S3, and store your info multiple times. I tend to email files to myself (thanks to MobileMe and Gmail), with the online search tools I can easily recover the information.

 

As to Bill's point about selective memory, there was a nice article in Wired magazine, titled "Remembering not to remember": http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-08/st_thompson

[Joe Muscara]

I may be taking this off topic here, but I feel like chiming in...

 

But relating to what Bill said above, people have WAY too much media storage space available now. It started with VHS, where you could potentially fit 8 freakin hours of a Christmas gathering on one tape. Now, hard drive camcorders are allowing people to shoot like 60 GIGABYTES of video, usually boring vacation scenery shots, with shaky image quality and pointless zooming in and out.

Ever see someone take a video of something like the Parthenon? It hasn't moved in 1000s of years, chances are small it's gonna move when you're filming it, dude. That's what still cameras are for.

[humannoyed]

P.S. Ain't nothin' wrong with a Slim Jim and an RC Cola! Royal Crown is the king of colas, after all! Noah

 

Wha? No moon pie??

 

I am curious what storage medium is considered the more permanent? HD in a climate controlled dustless environment?