April 22, 2004

CD-Rs Not Good for Archiving

PC Active, a Dutch personal computer magazine, ran a test and found that many CD-Rs start to come apart after only 2 years. Many CD-R companies brag that you can archive your data for 100 years or 1 million read cycles. This obviously is not the case according to this article. Companies suggest magnetic tape for true archiving for up to 30 years. I actually have most of my data archived on CD-Rs, so this report is scaring me. I need to pick up one of those one-touch backup hard-drives from Maxtor or Seagate. It's a bummer that they are pretty expensive vs. the cheap CD-Rs. Read