Hi, I’m just wondering if people could weigh in on which format is the most future-proof. In other words, which format (.bmp,tiff, etc.) will people still be able to view 20 years down the road? I’m wondering to which format I should store all archived family pictures.
Thank you very much for any help that can be offered.
More of a problem is what media to use for archiving – Will there be CD or DVD readers around in 20 years? Will HDD’s as we now know them still be around?
"which format (.bmp,tiff, etc.) will people still be able to view 20 years down the road"
My bet is that no format and no media will stand that timespan.
I’d try to devise a long term backup system replacement strategy that’d be lossless and low cost (DVD and TIFF seem to have the upper bet nowadays in that sense).
I think it’s much better invest a bit more in that replacement plan, or just to have it into account, than discovering 12 years later that all the archive system is simply digital crap.
And I’d store it using as much data harvesting as possible. Storage is cheaper every day.
Yep, hard copies do seem to be the most likely to survive depending on how they were made, etc.
What’s Adobe’s long term plan? Will they in the future continue to make programs backward compatible to run their old file formats? In other words will PS10 open a PSD made in PS7? Is there official word on the subject?
Yeah Tony, but I would have said the same thing about the 3.5 floppy a few years back … now Macs are shipped with no floppy drive.
I can see a switch from CD-ROM to DVD or something else … not from foresight, but because I have seen so many other "invincible standards" bite the dust with little or no warning when something better came out. Remember Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect … it could happen to anything.
Only time will tell Dave, but since we also produce a product on CD-ROM, and are being asked to include more and more data on the CD, DVD has been proposed as a distribution medium. As a result, we have hired a couple of analysts and done some research (data). No one has a crystal ball, and anything can happen, but we’re banking on CD-ROM for the foreseeable future.
Two salient points to be made: 1. if you are looking for a medium to archive your data, you will not lose using CD-ROM – using DVD, you run the risk of a "standards" issue sooner; 2. If you choose CD-ROM, there is PLENTY of time to migrate data in the event you need to – it’s not going away overnight.
The floppy drive is a good example. It is only at this late date, that the industry is comfortable migrating systems to be without them. It’s been around 10 years since the 1.44 was introduced, and it would be a STRETCH to say that they have completely gone by the wayside. It is only because of the adoption of CD-ROM as a standard distribution medium, and the lack of issues associated with it, that has allowed the industry to feel comfortable enough to stop shipping floppy drives automatically.
So the point I’m making is: anything *could* happen; if it does, there’s PLENTY of time to migrate.
Everybody burns to CD. Only the large volume CD replication houses press CD’s. You basically get yourself a CD-RW drive and it usually comes bundled with idiot proof software. Pretty easy really, provided you can install it on your machine.
If you have more questions about this, don’t hesitate to ask. Lots of folks here do this daily.
I’m a little late to this party, but I have thought a lot about Kyle’s problem, as I am busily scanning thousands of slides and prints for my family photo archive. The slides (35mm) are saved as TIFFs, each around 20 Mbytes. I can only get around 30 on a CD. So far, I have burned about 150 CDs. I was thinking about going to DVDs but was concerned about the standards mess. I think, as Tony has said, that there will be plenty of time to migrate later. I’d like to wait until the DVD-Blues are out…30 GBytes each. That would really cut down the migration effort! I decided to go with TIFFs…seemed the safest for now at least. Bert
The life span of a consumer created CD-R may be as short as a few days or weeks, depending on the media used and the burner employed to do the job.
Lets start here: Bargain CD-Rs arent. The common wisdom is to use the cheapest thing that works in your burner. Thats great for everyday stuff, but not for archival purposes. There are some media that should stand the test of time, and none of them sell for 5¢ apiece. I have used Verbatim DataLife and Kodak Ultima (discontinued) with success, but none of these discs have been around much longer than 2 years. Do your own research.
Burning speeds are climbing, and so are error rates. If you have a burner and media that zips along at whatever todays fastest recording speed is, knock it down to about 12X for your archival burning. Lower speed burns are more accurate burns.
To label or not? Good question. Paper labels can create balance problems and the glue that makes them stick on may or may not cause problems. The special pens that are made for writing on CDs are suspect in my book too. If you really want to play it safe, dont use either one.
The choice of the burner itself is something to consider carefully. Look for comparisons that quantify errors written to disk; obviously, lower is better. In the past, Teac and Plextor were among the leaders in this department but I have not done any recent research and do not endorse any particular model or manufacturer now.
Storage, or, Now that Ive burned it, how do I hang onto it? Well, I keep all my valuable discs in a safe deposit box at my bank. Really. Of course I have dupes at home, but the bottom line is that you should make dupes and store them anywhere BUT your home or office. Why? Ever hear of fire or theft? Thought so.
If you follow all these (or anyone else’s guidelines) can you be guaranteed that your data is going to last 100 years, or even 5? No. But you stand a better chance than you did before.
Thank you, everyone. I greatly appreciate all the help. Does anyone know how to create a CD-ROM, not a CD-R or CD-RW? Also, if I were going to scan someone’s pictures and put them onto CD, does anyone have any suggestions as far as a fair price to charge for that? I am worried about people who might bring me a photo done at a studio. Would I have to get that photographer’s permission before I scanned?
Does anyone know how to create a CD-ROM, not a CD-R or CD-RW?
CD-RW drives (vs CD-ROM drives) burn to all those different media. It is the media that makes the difference, really, and the capabilities of the software.
CD-R defines a blank medium, CD-ROM is what it becomes.
Ho, I have used some low-cost CD-Rs for some of my archive. The label is "GQ" (stands for Great Quality) sold by a local store here in southern Calif. called Fry’s. So far, I have not experienced any problems with them. I burn at 8x, and always verify the burn. I have spot-checked the files and have never lost any data that I know of. I use a software package called NTI CD Maker. To be safe, I switched recently to Memorex Blacks, but I have no data to indicate that they are any better or longer-lived. I am not concerned about the data for the long term…more than five years. I figure I’ll be migrating to a different medium before then anyway. Bert
Well said. Most CD-ROM manufacturers have a list of preferred media manufacturers.
In regards to the labeling issue, if you buy CD’s that have a writable label on them you are in the best of all worlds, since the coating is protective.
On my desktop systems we use Yamaha 24x burners; they’ve just come out with 52x, and we’ll be migrating to those later.
Our burners shipped with Nero. It turns out that at the Nero website, there are great utilities for verifying the integrity of your discs, including a ScanDisk. Food for thought.
I have used some low-cost CD-Rs for some of my archive. The label is "GQ" (stands for Great Quality) sold by a local store here in southern Calif. called Fry’s.
I’ve used lots of GQ discs (8X on a Yamaha 8x4x24). The only thing I’ve found wrong is they scratch easily. Some scratched audio CDRs 3 years old are now getting unreadable. Now, I’m using better media when it matters.
I took a GQ, recorded 700MB of data, and placed it shiny side up on a South-facing window sill, in Arizona, in July. After 15 days in the desert, an inexpensive CD/DVD drive (a LiteOn) was beginning to take a little longer to read the disc, but a high-quality CD drive has no trouble at all.
Finally, after three months on the window sill, the CD is unreadable by the innexpensive drive. But it’s still readable by the quality drive. The disc’s surface is scratched from dust-bunny attacks. The half of the disc that had faced the sun is markedly faded.
the black disc are excellent and not subject to ultraviolet deterioration as bad as many silver discs. I’ve used the memorex black for years and never had a miss burn or data loss that wasn’t caused by something I forgot to do like shutting down all non essential applications that were running. I also use a lot of GQ disc and have had very few problems with those but a lot of this seems to be the quality of the burner as well. At only 12-14 cents apiece the GQ are a bargain.
GQ disks at my local Fry’s are usually $7 for a spindle of 50. I went there yesterday, and the price for GQ’s was $14.99. So, I bought Memorex Blacks, which cost $19.99. Thought I would try something different. I burned 5 last night, and they seem fine. Bert
Taiyo Yuden is noted for being the highest quality due to their history.<<
I use Tys for my everyday burning tasks, and I have archived on them as well. They almost always are sold with someone else’s name on them (*some* Fuji, Memorex, etc). As a *general* rule, look for the country of origin on the label. If it says, "Made in Japan" they’re probably Tys.
Way on up the thread, someone mentioned the NERO site and the utilities they have for download. One is a media test program that writes a preprogrammed disk of data then analyses what the drive reads for errors.
Apparently there are two types of CD-R errors. Correctable C-1 and uncorrectable C-2. Here are the rough results from a bulk purchase blank top cheap, vrs normal grade TDK. These are from my memory of what I saw this past weekend.
From this, I will be using 150+ cheap ones to carry non critical things from the house to the office & back and be tossed after each trip. Once they are gone, they will not be purchased again. Some savings sure aren’t. Perhaps I can sell them for $5-10/50 and buy some good ones.
Since I need blank top CD’s, that’s why I go with Mitsui (or would go with Taiyo Yuden).
My advice to the consumer is this: buy CD’s that have a writable surface. The coating is thicker and far more protective over time than almost any sticky label, and there’s no risk of a reaction between the glue of the label and the polymer on the CD label surface.
In addition, the CD’s with a writable surface, from brand name mfr’s are usually more rigorously QC’d – not always true, but in general.
Look at Nero’s utilites; specifically one called CDSpeed. It performs a pretty comprehensive analysis on the drive/media. It’s a decent way of qc’ing a batch of CD’s or of troubleshooting issues with your drive.
Tony, Do you have to use Nero’s burner with the utilities? I don’t have Nero any more. Used to have an old version of it, but I had some problem (don’t remember what) and quit using it. I use NTI CD Maker now. Bert
They are legal free downloads and do not have to have Nero installed to run them. I don’t and they ran fine.
A C-1 error, as I understand it, is one the drive can work around/re-read/or something to recover the data. That being the case, you could have a bunch of them and the verify would check out fine.
They, to me, indicate a possible problem area on the disk on down the road. and a good reason to make more than one copy of backed up files on GOOD media.
Semi-off-thread. Is it ethical to sell Ol’ El Cheepo CD-Rs below your cost to an unsuspecting co-worker you don’t like? This assumes I am honest and tell him that these were low priced ones and to turn off SmartBurn and set it to 32x max write.
I read with interest the posts around CD-R quality and the various tests and links, as I’ve been having problems with some of my burns.
I’ve downloaded CDspeed, and have mapped out a series of tests on my current media.
Useful information, thanks folks.
cheers Klaas
PS, back in the bad old days, I once left an 8" floppy disk on the front seat of my car in direct sunlight for about four hours – it turned into mush <grin>
I used to be a lot more current on my info re/ burners and media, but I have not needed update my knowledge base for sometime. Some of you may be wanting to do your own research, so here are some links to peruse:
Notes on cdrinfo: Good info if you dig for it. Check out the forums. Also of particular interest on this site is the essay, Testing Media Quality. Find it here:
