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In article news:<rgsp74hsgh2oggqacjj1gmgp7gp2jfdh3o@xxxxxxx>, Jim wrote:
> >> I recently bought 20 Kodak Gold archival DVD-Rs. They're guaranteed
> >> to retain their data for 100 years.
I had a little read-up on Kodak's gold DVDs after posting yesterday. I
have yet to find anything that says that there's a guarantee at all, let
alone a useful one.
Yes, they're /designed/ to last 100 years or more, but that doesn't mean
they will. As none has yet survived 100 years we can only guess how long
they will really last.
> >How does that work? Will Kodak magically reconstruct your data for
> >you if/when the DVDs become unreadable in 30 years time?
>
> If/when ...
The media *WILL* fail. The question is when. It might not be as soon as
30 years -- it might even be as many as 100 for some disks -- but you
don't know (and nor do Kodak).
> > At best it means that Kodak will refund the cost of the media if
> > they fail.
>
> After 100 years!
Well, no ... if there is a 100 year warranty you won't be able to claim
on it after 100 years. Only if the media fail before that.
The point was that the mdia don't matter. It's your data that matter and
I'll bet that Kodak don't cover the data in the warranty.
In any case, you probably won't be able to get a DVD reader in more than
about ten years time (and DVD drives certainly don't last 100 years) so
you'll have to transcribe your data to the current medium of the choice
every ten years or so anyway.
For archival of photos, the best advice is (still) to make slides on
good quality archival film and store them in a temperature and humidity
controlled environment. The images may degrade over time, but as
analogue images they will still be viewable after more dgradation has
taken place than would render a digital archive unreadable.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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