The Grouse: Where is My Mind?

Welcome to the inaugural posting of The Grouse, where once a week I’ll be ranting (and very occasionally raving) about tech, gadgets and the like that I find to be frustrating, or lacking, or stupid, or offensive, or even downright criminal (and maybe all of the above). And because misery loves company, I welcome your personal complaints for exploration in future grousings, as well as more positive comments, of course, which I will summarily dismiss if they bug me for whatever reason. That’s how I roll.

This week, I’m giving the stinkeye to an entire industry: the big bunch of liars who, for a couple decades now, have conned us into believing that optical media (CDs and DVDs) are an easy, reliable, stable method for long-term archiving of data. See, when burnable CDs and PC drives became common in the late ’90s, they were billed as having life spans of 75 to even 200 years. But although independent sources like the Council on Library and Information Resources sort of confirmed it, saying that under optimal conditions optical media can last at least a few decades, the rub is that it really applies only to high-quality, factory-pressed CDs stored under very specific conditions—which is to say, not that stack of 20-cent CD-Rs burned at 42x and then crammed into the back of your desk drawer.

At least one IBM researcher has recently found that using typical cheap, low-quality bulk CD-Rs and DVDs (which can fail for a host of reasons), we can expect our data to be reliable for, oh, more like a piddling two to five years, or about the same life span as a hard drive. In my book, this constitutes not only fraud but gross negligence on the part of manufacturers. I’m making the prediction now that in the next five or so years, a real humdinger of a class-action lawsuit is going to come out when millions (or billions) of us discover that all those backups of irreplaceable family photos, music and home movies, as well as financial records, letters and e-mails that we’ve carefully burned to disc will simply be gone—poof!—like Keyser Soze. Or perhaps more aptly, we’ll all be like a bunch of Marty McFlys in Back to the Future, watching our memories fade away before our eyes. Fortunately, there is a  remedy (after the jump, of course).

A remedy:
Data storage, it turns out, is one of the thorniest conundrums of the 21st century. Humans are generating data in ever-increasing amounts and yet, amazingly, we still haven’t figured out a stable, reliable way of securing it for the future. Unless you have access to a spectacularly tricked-out DeLorean, the best method for backing things up for the long term, then, is to have a good-old fashioned redundant system. Regularly back up your PC’s hard drive to an external hard drive. And back that up periodically to another hard drive—which you keep away from home. As history has shown us time and again, physical media lasts the longest (think hieroglyphics), so for precious photos, get prints made on archival paper, and print out and store irreplaceable documents (score one for the Luddites!). For music, beyond doing hard-drive backups, burn backup audio CDs—not of MP3 data files, but of the actual audio files, which are typically still readable even with errors. Store them in cases, stacked vertically like books, in a cool, dark place. Rinse/repeat every few years if you want them to last as long as, say, a vinyl record. If you must use optical media, manufacturers do sell specifically labeled “archival” gold-foil CDs (which we all thought we were buying in the first place, of course). They cost a few bucks each and have been rated and tested to last 300 years. Ahem.

And let’s run a little non-scientific experiment, shall we? How about some of you dig through your old CDs and see how many have already failed and then post your results. Once we hit a critical mass, we can start calling the lawyers . . . —Jonathan Chase

(Image credit: indi.ca)

Comments

[bambam]

I Know this 4 a fact too. but I didn't think company was stupid enough 2 store data in cd's/dvd's if they wanted to last longer than a year. for those who don't know, this is a great report. Thank you.

[Some Guy]

I realized a while back that my burned CDs were dying. Some of them had developed huge visible black marks after being stored in harsh sunlight and alternating heat and cold (though I'm not totally sure that's what did it). Luckily they weren't used for anything important.
But thanks for the reminder; I should be checking up on my backup DVD-Rs and -RWs soon.

[Rick Crammond]

Public outcry over environmental contamination caused by billions of CD's and DVD's will likely make them go the way of the dodo and more recently, the plastic bag...namely, bye-bye.

All is not lost. (just data!)
There are ways to get further enjoyment and education out of these silly self-mutilating polycarbonate disc products, before they get the heave-ho.

For example, I make cool little home-made Tesla-style Turbines out of re-used CD discs and spindles. I have more fun with the Tesla CD Turbines, than I did with the original music and programs on the discs themselves!

[neuro]

Working for a major Multi-National corporation, one who provides data backup and recovery services (I will not directly name it). When a Blue Shirted sales person brings a new computer to a white shirted, clip-on tie wearing, services technician such as myself, we use the cheapest DVD+-R's available to us. I would be surprised if the Operating System Recovery discs we create last a year, let alone the five years that a person expects to keep a computer. The data that we back up and burn to discs sometimes doesn't even make it home with the customer before the disc is unreadable, and they are checked just after burning.
I for years backed up my data to CD's and DVD's, that is until i noticed that they were unusable after a couple of years. I lost countless pictures and movies, let alone music and sound. Shortly after I discovered that my discs were going bad, I shifted my backups to an external hard drive, and online data backup utilities.
Also thank Google for its Gmail, free data backup ability 10 megabytes at a time, simply email yourself whatever is most precious. Since Google's obsession with excess means that I will never logically fill my account with any amount of my own things.
I'm in for class action, I've lost enough to make it worth my while...

[Matthew]

I actually don't have a problem with the CD-Rs that I used a little over 8 years ago. They are still readable and haven't given me a problem. The only disks that have given me a problem are the ones that I didn't close the disk on. The ones that I thought that I was going to keep recording more things onto but forgot about. Those are the disks that are unreadable. But then again, I've kept all of those disks in the packages they've come in and take a look at them every couple of years. I will say that I've started to back up those CD-Rs onto an external hard drive just recently. Still no major problems with what I've looked at.