http://msn.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124312,00.asp?GT1=7645
Just caught this article regarding the life span of burned CDs... frankly I'm shocked. The author then goes on to recommend magnetic tape?! My experience with magnetic tape has not been good.
Using a DLT-4, probably higher quality, I still get random restore errors, one error happened in a 1GB pst file that Outlook was NOT able to recover. (This was after I, the IT guy, had mistakenly erased it when trying to move it to a newer computer.) This tape had literally JUST be written to last night, and had many errors... “Demagnetize the tape head“, “Make sure the drive is clean,“ ...yeah I've done all that, yet still magnetic tapes seem to let me down... hard.
Back to the article, they claim that the cheaper CDs potentially only last 1.5 years, while the more expensive, higher quality (Verbatim seems to make very high quality CDs) last up to a maximum(?) of 5 years... that just astounds me...
Now I'm a little worried about my stacks of burned CDs of old code, projects and so forth. Seems like the best way to archive old data is to keep copying it to newer hard drives!
Has anybody really tested their older burned CDs?