- Thread starter
- #31
By predictability I meant error scanning.IBM expert warns of short life span for burned CDs
"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"
I think he's talking about the worst-case, but worst-cases are what we're talking about avoiding. If something is really important, you should probably re-create your backups every few years. The simple fact is that no one's ever tried to use a 100 year old cd. We can project their lifespans, but that's based on a stack of assumptions which may or may not hold true, as the CD rot shows.
I mean, practically speaking, your media is going to outlive the usefulness of most of your data, but there are probably some things that people don't ever want to lose, important photos for example. There should probably be a distinction between "backups" and "archives". When I go to visit family, they can pull out photos and documents from around 100 years ago. I think the current generation may have trouble doing that. Pretty much everything mentioned in this thread is good short-term, say for the next couple of years, but for 10-20? or 100? Even the prints made by most modern printers aren't going to hold up for that long.
And I had no CD failing in my life so far. I have 20 year old working discs.
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