Recently I bought some HDD's to save my data (backups, photos, music, movies, etc.) and I decided to copy all my existing CD's and DVD's onto HDD and throw away the disks to keep everything in one place and to get rid of the increasing backup DVD stack.

Guess what. I can't read half of the disks written 1-3 years ago!!! I knew that the design life of a CD is 20-100years but the actual 2-3 years is dangerously low.

I tried to read the CD's in question in many drives, the reading always stops at the same percent. I have CD's which aluminum foil (the actual data carrier) comes down so no way to recover the data but 99% of the CD's has prefect, unscratched surface, those simply doesn't read. Most of them is eProformance so don't buy this brand.

I decided to move on HDD backups (instead of DVD's), so all my data is stored twice on 2 separate HDD's. These are external, USB HDD's.

Actually I learned my lesson about using named brands some 10 years ago when some of my music disc backed up 3 years prior on the cheapies did not read at all.
Since then, I have been playing my thousand odd music cds as well as my backup cds and dvds and glad to say, all seems well.
At the price that bulk cds and dvds are , it's almost senseless not to stick with named brands.
Do I really worry much about archival longevity? Well, I haven't looked at any of my negs and slides from the 70s, 80s and early 90's. So perharps, who knows,
the digital images I backed up nowadays may not be so important to me in 30 years time. ie. if I live to be that old 

Oh my goodness Adelaide, zip drive...
now that's old media for you. Yes completely forgot about them. It's true too,
last time I checked my Amiga zipdisks they were all still working well. Yes, if you can believe it, Amiga ... now that's old ! 
No truer words can be said, as Adelaide just mentioned... proper storage is a must .

I had heard before about refreshing your back ups ie copying CDs/DVDs/HDs onto fresh media every few years (Just bought a 1 TB today to back up my back ups).

Yes, I ahve heard of that recommendation too.

Speaking of old things, I still have some IBM punch cards.  

And I probably still have the cassette tape in which I recorded programs from my Casio scientific calculator.

But I am not old, I was a prodigy.

Regards,
Adelaide

Scary thought really........

Imagine the number of commandments we might have been stuck with then....        

Unfortunately, there have been many reports in the industry of CDs/DVDs having a lifespan of only a few years.  It is one of the reasons that I moved away from CDs/DVDs onto HDDs a few years ago.

Here is just one of those reports:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/10/73755_HNcdlifespan_1.html

You should ... save your data on professionally maintained RAID arrays, in addition to any local backups.

While many people like RAID, it has its problems as well (and in my opinion is much over-rated for home usage).  For example, if your RAID controller goes bad and you can't find a replacement then you have probably just lost all of your data.  You would be surprised how often this happens.  Trying to find a replacement RAID controller for hardware that is only a few years old can be very difficult.

I do backups on another PC at home. I do plan to get an external HDD to have backups there as well. These days, one cen get 1TB for around $100 on sale.

What about using solid state for those with smaller ports? I know that flash drives and cards have a limited number of writes / rewrites but as far as long term storage life are they any good? Should also be easy to store them in a fire proof box.

What about using solid state for those with smaller ports? I know that flash drives and cards have a limited number of writes / rewrites but as far as long term storage life are they any good? Should also be easy to store them in a fire proof box.

For smaller ports all options are open. Writing on DVD is fine too, as long as you write 2 copies every time, and you rewrite them every 2 years. If it's just for backup, USB sticks are overkill since they are intended as transportable rewritable medium and their price is too high per Gig for just backup. You could backup your stuff on an Ipod too  .

If you just have few Gigs to backup, consider free unlimited online storage like Gmail or Yahoo mail. You can simply mail the images to yourself on another account, so you have them twice per provider: as sender (in your outbox) and as receiver (in your inbox). There are aps around that treat Gmail and Ymail as a netdrive, but I think it's against the TOS of Yahoo and Google. Normal mail should do.

For larger ports, the real problem with DVDs is their limited storage and the number of manipulations required to backup. For 100 Gig for instance, you will have to insert/remove 50 (25 x 2) DVDs.

The last 3 months of 2008 I shot about 30 Gig. That corresponds with roughly 3,000 photos. Far from all is stock of course. Most is travel, just personal, or (especially) assignements like band shoots, events and commissioned portraiture. There are also the bloopers but I hate to delete them since they can be a goldmine for cloning in case you missed the tip of an elbow of in a good model shot. Customers of commissioned shoots also expect you to keep a backup since it's incredible how many dogs there are around that eat the DVDs you give their masters. 

I keep all the versions: NEF and JPG out of the cam, and for the processed shots also the 16-bit TIFF. The TIFF stands for editing time, and time is money. The TIFF is lossless and you can always fall back on it for tweaking. An 8-bit JPG is lossy and every time you open/modify/save it again, it degrades. So that gives roughly 60 MB per processed shot: 8 MB NEF, 3 MB JPG out of cam, 35 MB TIFF (zipped or it's 60), 8 MB JPG for Alamy, 3 MB JPG (6MP) for SS, 5MB JPG (10 MP) for the rest.

So for an average shooter, count on 100 Gig per year, at least. Volume shooters (the guys with studios) might have a multiple of that. There is simply no other way to back up this volume of data in a productive way (time is money) than on HD and price is not an excuse since 1 Terra USB HDs will be around 140 $/110 euro in the post NewYear's sale.

Four notes:
- It makes sense to distinguish between shots with an emotional value (personal, family, travel) and shots without, like a model studio shoot. The first ones you'd backup always, the second you can discard largely and just keep the production images once the best are processed.
- When you backuped on an external HD, check the freshly made thumbs there quickly by a program that doesn't cache thumbs (Windows does) like Irfanview. Disks can fail...
- I'm worried for the time 24 MP cams will be the standard.
- I wonder how Yuri Arcurs backs up.

I have no problems reading my personal archives recorded on CDs 10 years ago or even earlier. But they are brand name CDs; and they were read very few times since recorded.

I've read many times that DVDs are protected much better and should survive longer. However I've read may posts of people who lost their data, like one above so I am revising my backup strategy right now.

I used to put my RAW and edited PSD files on 2 DVDs of different brands; but now I will put a copy on 2 external hard drives (that will be different brands and will only be used for backup; one of the 2 will be kept off-site); plus I started uploading selected most important RAW files to Amazon S3 (to avoid too high costs I don't upload large PSD files; just some RAW files and personal data). That's my plan for now and it is already partially implemented.

Quote from: whitechild on January 05, 2009, 04:16

CD and DVD are completly different when longevity is in question. DVD last 10 or more times longer than CD because of different material used as medium. Average life of CD is 2-10 years depending on disk quality, and DVD lasts at least 20 years, and sometimes up to 300 years.

Did you check your DVDs after 300 years yet? 
That's what the manufacturers told about CDs too, 10 years ago.

Oh no I found that somewhere on internet, but I tried to find it today and I couldn't Don't believe me on this

Moreover, the stupid socialist tax-horny Belgian government puts a tax of 0.12 eurocent on empty CDs and 0.59 eurocent on empty DVDs in behalf of the maffia of music and film companies to compensate them for the loss by illegal copying. Even if you put your own data and photos on the DVDs, you are bound to pay this tax of almost 1$ on a DVD, which goes then entirely to RIAA and IFPI maffiosi. No wonder sales of empty (and also music) CDs went down and that of HDs (untaxed till now) goes up (the ever-inventive politicians are thinking now about a tax on HDs and PCs, on behalf of the music and movie industry).


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That canon it's just a way of protecting authors from piracy. While it's awkard, because it doesn't tell about storage media used to pirate copies from the ones used to store own content, it is the only effective way of giving back to the authors and the industry a tiny perercentage of what they lose everyday through PSP nets. I dont't now how do you react when you find a photo, or an illustration or whatever you do stolen; maybe it's ok with you, I don't know, but musicians, moviemakers etc are workers as well, and they deserve not to be stolen in masse.