Archival DVDs

A few monthe ago, I switched over to Delkin's archival Gold CDs for

storage of images or groups of images 650 Megabytes and smaller.

These CDs use a Phthalocyanine dye formula that will supposedly last

for 300 years (I'll be happy if these CDs just outlast me):

 

 

http://www.delkin.com/delkin_products_archival_gold.html

 

 

Anyway, I've been annoyed that there have not been any archival DVDs

on the market for storing multi-Gigabyte images and image

groupings. Wellll, Delkin is now producing a "100 year" archival

gold DVD:

 

 

http://www.delkin.com/delkin_products_archival_gold_dvd.html

You might want to check out MAM-A at: http://www.mitsuicdr.com/ they have archival

DVDs now. Their tests show that standard silver DVDs fail in less then 500 hrs of use. I

would think the length of time a DVD/CD will last depends on how many hours it was played.

I wouldn't worry about lasting 300 years, they will be new technology replacing them in less

then 10 years or so and we will be transferring our data over.

25 for $72.99 - what a bargain.

Scott, I get Delkin products at dealer net through the store I work at, so price isn't an issue for me. However, one way to think of archival DVD prices would be a comparison with external hard drives.

 

 

If these archival DVDs store 4.5 Gigabytes, 25 would round off to 112 Gigabytes of storage. At $73 for 25, that would work out to $0.65 per Gigabyte of storage.

 

 

A LaCie 250 Gigabyte drive runs $229:

 

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=349105&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation

 

 

As such, the external drive would cost $0.92 per gigabyte. Perhaps the DVD price isn't so bad?

Eric, I can get regular ATA133 Samsung drives (more reliable than WD or Maxtor in my experience) from Newegg for about $.50 a gig. External enclosures are dirt cheap - end of problem.

 

DVDs have a lot of format questions to answer before we consider them archival media. The 'gold' trick was tried with CDRs, but nobody really bought into it other than Kodak.

When those archival Gold CD's fail you can get a free disk! Some of my many year old premium archival gold 5 dollar name brand disks have failed. They were stored in jewel cases; in a humidity controlled room. These were written at 2 and 4 x; when 8x was the quickest writter. With important images; I use several disks; and also keep them on a server. The gold archival marketing blurb is real old. You may want to use two different brands too.

In the failed old gold CD's here; many times the failure is with the larger files; ie above say 20 megs; with small thumbs and jpegs that are only 1 meg all readable. Some of the failed larger images have a partial image; line wrapped in the middle; a tiff header corrupted. Thus a 80meg poster saved as a full tiff might be gone; or 1/2 there; but the jpeg compressed version that is say 5 megs is useable. The larger a file size is; the greater chance it can be corrupted; when your disk goes into non archival mode.

Eric, I have an array of 160GB internal Samsung drives that were $70 each (with shipping). I stack them externally in an old rack and use a USB to IDE converter ($20 item from newegg).

 

Even if the DVD's were less money they would be a huge waste of time compared to the convenience of working with hard drives. 4.5 GB isn't enough space to make it worthwhile and using all the space on each one becomes a headache to manage.

I guess we have to pick our poison. I've yet to have a CD or DVD fail.

 

 

From what I can tell, there are two issues with writeable disks. The first is the metal reflective layer, which can corrode or delaminate. The second is the permanence of the inks, which can fade and become unreadable.

well i've seen plenty of cd's go bad-- those shitty tyak brand or some crap like that. they flaked off layers of crap eventualy and were completely worthless. dvd's aren't exactly really different technology, i couldn't see the same thing not happening to some of the cheaper ones here too now.

From what I gather, the issue of archiving digital data (and images) is actually quite deep. I suspect if you Google this you'll find it is causing lots of headaches for archivists and librarians.

 

Frankly, I would only worry about the stability of your chosen CD/DVD's over 5 to 10 year spans. At the end of that future interval, you'd want do a bulk transfer of the images to the popular storage media of the time. Think about it, what would you be doing now had you archived data on Zip disks in 1995?

 

And now to be perverse, the most reliable option for archiving images is probably to find a film writer, burn your digital images out to Kodakchrome, and keep them in temperature controlled dark storage. These really might have a chance of lasting a couple hundred years and still be "readable".

In out print shop we still use Zip disks at odd times; to transfer files for print jobs on DOS machines. One of my P4 3 Ghz computers has a built in ZIP drive; a 5 1/4 floppy drive for oddball customer old files. One really weird thing is that old 3 1/2 floppies from 10 years ago are often an order of magnitude more robust than a new 3 1/2 diskette" one bought last week. It is like the floppy makers really lost the formula; and all is crap now. With an original IBM PC; I have a cassette cable and recorder too.

Regarding the greater occurance of problems in large vs small files.

 

In files of any size one can create a PARity set to go with data that is truely valuable. Whatever medium I use I reserve 20% of the space to PAR files for recovery of corrupted data.

 

So, if my 80MB file had 2MB of bad data 2MB of PAR files would suffice to allow my computer to reconstruct the damaged sections and re-archive it on a new medium.

 

In addition so the 20% PAR rule I've set for myself I just burn 3 copies to diffrent brands of media, usualy the most inexpensive available. Two sets are stored offsite (one in a safe-deposit box, another at my sister's home.) I've yet to have any file fail to be recoverable. This is similar to the principle of RAID arrays in the world of hard drives (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) where instead of few expensive drives data is instead mirrored onto multiple drives of lower expense. This results in a lower likelyhood of a hardware failure destroying your data. The down side is 4 drives in a RAID array take up more space, use more power, make more noise, and create more heat than any single drive of the same capacity. In my world, it means a potential clutter of recordable media, and a longer investment of time in the creation of backups.

http://www.delkin.com/store/customer/home.php?cat=66

 

Anybody gonna buy a few and give 'em a shot? I know I'll give them a test drive.

Holy cow, that is expensive. At that price, it simply does not make sense; you could buy three HD.

I've been scanning and archiving historical images for many years now, having directed historical documentaries for national broadcast. The truth is, like so many other "experts" in this world, archivist don't really agree on the best storage media. So I will give you my personal opinion;

 

*Store images digitally on two formats - for me that's been firewire drives and gold DVDs (my current choice is MAM-A at about $2 per disc). Label the DVDs using appropriate "safe" markers.

 

*Have physical photographic prints made of digital photos.

 

*Be aware that digital files should be migrated occasionally to newer types of storage media (once firmly established). I believe this is why many archivist have fought digital storage - it requires more upkeep than just storing a physical image in an archival folder for 100 years.

 

I'm not saying this is "the" answer, just MY answer. There is no perfect solution. But these steps seem like the best for now.