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January 11, 2006
Is Your Digital Data Safe?
My wife and I take a lot of photos, and for the last four years we've shot digital, exclusively. Of course, without the cost of film processing, it's also much easier to shoot a bunch of images--which leads to the question of storage.
I worked for a while back in the late nineties as a recording engineer, right at the time when digital recording became really commonplace in studios. Burning your own CDs was a wonderful new innovation that was used for both music and session data storage, and in a commercial studio the questions of durability and reliability of the storage medium, although they didn't stop adoption of the new technology, certainly generated a lot of debate.
In the ensuing years as our photo count rolled into the multiple thousands, I sporadically tried to find more info on the deterioration rate of the dye-based CDs we burn at home; all I could find out was that almost everyone, including pro photographers, archives to CD or DVD.
Now James Joyner at Outside the Beltway highlights an article in PC World that finally addresses the issue:
Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland, has his own view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime. "Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke says. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more."
The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam. "Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years," Gerecke says. "Some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years."
Gerecke's conclusion includes using magnetic tape as a backup (tape, if properly cared for, can last longer), or even backing up to another hard drive (hard drive costs are plummeting). The best piece of advice he gives: stay alert for new technology and be ready to migrate your data to new media as innovations are made.
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