Homemade DVD’s: Going, Going, Gone?

[Paul Fierlinger]

Following is a copy of a short article by the New York Time's IT commentator which I think should be of interest to many people here:

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.)

Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old!

Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable.

Tried them on a MacBook that I’d been sent to review. Incredibly, mercifully, they all came through fine. I was able to rescue all those original iMovie projects and copy them onto new, bigger, cheaper hard drives.

But holy cow—how many thousands of people are backing up onto DVD, thinking that they’ll be set for at least a decade or two?

I know, of course, that home-burned DVD’s, which rely on organic dye that deteriorates with time, are nowhere near as long-lived as commercially pressed discs. But man. Four years? Scared the bejeezus out of me.

I’ve been told by experts that the gold DVD blanks can indeed last 100 years. Guess I’ll be trying that next!

[slowtiger]

Right now nobody knows for sure how long CDs and DVDs last, especially not the manufacturers. I've got self-burnt CDs from about 1995 which are readable without problems, and I've got 5 yrs old music CDs (completely different process) which don't play and show visible deteriorating. All are stored under normal living room conditions, in their jewel cases.

[Sierra Rose]

So what? the things you really treasure you recopy periodically?

[Paul Fierlinger]

Data that is required of me to save by clients I keep on a good external hard drive which I keep in my bank's safety deposit box.

[Sierra Rose]

So every day you go get the external from your safe deposit box, bring it home, back up your work and return it to the bank? We also have DVD's in a safety deposit box, but it sounds like a futile plan now. Although my work doesn't have the value yours does.

I have an external I use as back up but I don't take it to the bank every day.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I have a large HD in the bank and a pocket one which I update with backup saves all day long as I work. This one I carry with me whenever I leave the house. After it pretty much fills up (weeks), I fetch the one from the bank, update it with the data from the pocket HD, reformat the pocket HD and return the large HD to the bank.

You could preserve your favorite DVDs by backing them up onto a small, external HD -- they cost around $ 100 for 120 GB or so.

[Klaus Hoefs]

You could preserve your favorite DVDs by backing them up onto a small, external HD -- I update with backup saves all day long as I work

But won't last forever... highly used and hard working HDs may live for 5 years or less.

Here is a research result:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Temperature isn't an issue for the first three years (up then with temperature over 35° is a risk). Their third year seems to be their turning point - if they overcome their third year the results are the same as in their second year or after working for 6 months. But there is no final conclusion even after observing 100.000 models for many years.
So good advice could be to store data on not-highly used additional HDs.

[slowtiger]

You may want to read up about backup strategies in archives. The topic re-occurs regularly in magazines.

Right now, the technical choices we have are:
1. Hard drives
2. Magnetic tape
3. CD/DVD
4. USB sticks
5. Film.

Additionally one has to distinguish between short-term and long-term (archieval) storage.

I've worked in a bigger multimedia company for years. They used a common backup strategy, like this:
The server(s) have a RAID system configured in a way that every information is stored independantly at least twice. This is to cover a single disk failure.
Every night the whole server disk is stored on a tape which is kept nearby in a safe, or at least safe from fire. This is to cover a server breakdown the next day. These tapes are overwritten the next week.
Once a week the server disk is stored on a tape which is kept in a different location, like in a bank. These tapes are kept at least a year.

This is a strategy to just cover the daily work of a company. It doesn't save anything for years, or keep a useful archive. In order to cover that purpose as well, there's more:

Finished projects (or parts) are stored on multiple CDs/DVDs, meant to be read within a year or two in case some stuff gets re-used or is needed for PR purposes. This is an "archive for use". There's another "archive for keeping" which only holds complete and finished stuff, in a different place, on long-term media.

As you see, there's a lot of redundant saving involved, a lot of media and surely a lot of time to repeatedly copy data. Not all of this is an option for us "small business types", but we can be prepared as well.

- Keep an external drive connected to your workstation, to save a duplicate of your daily results.
- Once a week (in case of a busy artist like paul) or less often ( in my case) save your weekly results to a drive at a different location. This could be done on DVD as well, but in that case I'd recommend to save the last 4 weeks each week - the overlap of 3 weeks should cover a single DVD failure. If you have a good internet connection, some storage service provider could be a solution, but he should be prepared to do this as a backup.
- Important parts of projects should be saved independantly, like all source material for you video types, or all sound, all renders, whatever. Save those twice, at least. Keep source media, like video tapes, in the same archive place, under best conditions.

[User 767]

I have some vague memory of Paul not caring about archival quality in the past (Mirage days). I apologize if that's not accurate. There was more to that.

Magnetic media degenerates (self-erases) in time, no matter what. The data is probably going to be obsolete/incompatible one day anyway. The drive interface is going to do the same.

Optical media varies in quality-substantially. The dyes they use, the plastic, the molding temperature, the coating process-all the things that go into making the disk. Currently, Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim are the DVD blanks of choice. So far, they seem to be the most stable of my piles of DVD's (and CD's). I guess they're good enough to be worth some companies making counterfits of them.

I have a bunch of Princo disks that are worthless now. Same data, same storage conditions on Verbatim disks are fine. Other people's experiences are similar. If you care, most DVD burning software can identify the manufacturer of the disks you are using (there are only a few manufacturers-Sony, for example just puts their name on someone else's disks (as do many others)).

Really, though, with the way computers change, how much of the data do you think will be compatible with any software in ten or twenty years anyway?

Naturally, I back up all of my important data by carving it into granite blocks. Storage and transport is terrible, but I figure the data is safe for a couple of thousand years (unless I drop it)

[Sierra Rose]

Well I have an external already hooked up to my computer (which has a mirrored raid). But the external is several years old...

From what is said here, maybe I should buy 2 more externals. Transfer what is on my current external to one of the new ones and use the second new external for finalized data and keep it in our safe (to protect from fire).

The question is can I use my current external for anything? It shows no signs of failing, but it is old and maybe untrustworthy? Thoughts?

[Paul Fierlinger]

I have some vague memory of Paul not caring about archival quality in the past (Mirage days). I apologize if that's not accurate. There was more to that.

Apologize away seven-sixty-seven because there indeed was more (or less) to that. You must be confusing my professed lack of interest to keep in storage my own works for more than a couple of years, with my reasonable concerns to protect WIP before delivery dates have been met. As I said lower (I keep my fresh posts sensibly piling to the top) I keep things in storage only at the request of clients. I charge them for it too.