The biggest issue w/mechanical hard drives is the bearings and lubricants in them. Your not going to care, and your relatives will be spinning and doing backups on what they want to keep….

No need to try to go back 30 years or 100 years ). You’ll always have a backup of your ‘data’ if you do that. So best way is to just keep your wanted data spinning, and backup periodically for those times when you have a disk failure. Point is anyway, by the time the media goes bad, you have probably moved on to another storage technology anyway. There is none that just ‘sits’ (unless optical media of course). Thing is though, how many plan to ‘use’ or have a method to retrieve the backup after that period of time? Or have a need for it? I rotate my backup devices worst case ‘maybe three years’ on yearly backup media. Just don’t pass magnets over it ….ĭVD – 30 years, but some say 100-200 years in right environment. SSD – 8-10 Years powered off is a good number for ‘typical’ environment. Posted in Art Tagged CD-R, CD-ROM, lightscribe Post navigationįrom what I ‘glean’ from doing a simple web search … We would have made a Wrencher disc for our pictures, but sadly for some of us who were once in the thick of it we don’t have any CD-Rs any more. You can find it all in a GitHub repository, and have a go at creating your own offerings. The code creates a data structure of a standard CD-ROM session which doesn’t contain any usable data, instead whose pits and lands are arranged to form the image. The data is encoded as a series of pits and lands crested by the laser vapourising small portions of the dye to make holes. They’re often gold coloured, but the silvering is in fact just aluminium. Haven’t got a fancy drive and desire an etched CD-R? No worries, has a solution, in software which writes a disk image for a standard CD writer whose data makes the visible image on the disc.ĬD-Rs have a thin layer of phthalate dye sandwiched between the polycarbonate disc and a silvered layer of lacquer. Most people eventually owned CD writer drives, and some fancy ones came with the feature of etching pictures in the unused portions of the disc. These now archaic storage media came first as silver pre-recorded CD-ROMs, then later as recordable CD-Rs. When we routinely carry devices holding tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s sometimes a shock to remember that there was once a time when 650 MB on a CD was a very big deal indeed.

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