Apparently, even name-brand discs are likely to have significant failures after 7 years.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/cdr-dvdr-nero-storage,news-4269.html

Nothing new-I've had problems with "Forget-ex" CD/Rs after 5 or 6 years, so I buy only Verbatim now.  I moved everything over to DVD/R.  I was hoping for a great new storage advance to move them to, but nothing yet.

I make at least two copies on anything vital.

I agree.  That might be disturbing, but it is hardly news.  Not to minimize the negative effects.  I do know this from personal experience.  WandW said it:  "Two copies of anything vital." 

Well WandW, there is blue-ray which gives you 50 Gig or more on a single disk (dependant on media), but I would suggest waiting for a while. The media are hellishly expensive right now, but will come down as more sales start happening. It's new technology but has been around for a while now.

Although it is new technology, the longevity issue is still relatively unknown.

Dr Geep has a slide on CDR vs CDRW.

I hope the flash drives last a long time.  I've been keeping my DAZ downloads on them.

I keep all critical data on a second hard drive. My primary hard drive only contains the operating system and installed programs. The second hard drive is backed up weekly to another hard drive so I always have two copies of everything. I've had too many CD's and DVD's fail to trust them to anything critical. To MLP, I've had those flash drives fail as well, seems kinda scary to me. Huge hard drives are pretty cheap these days for peace of mind.

Precisely why my back ups are triplicated as per NASA recommendations!

Quote - Precisely why my back ups are triplicated as per NASA recommendations!

coughmoonlandingtapescough

 NEVER use CDRW!!
not sure why they still make them.

Cheers

CDRW!!!  The ultimate in corruptable storage media!!

Print out the binary contents of every file. Acid free paper lasts for centuries. Now the restore might be a bit of a hassle though. 

Quote - Print out the binary contents of every file. Acid free paper lasts for centuries. Now the restore might be a bit of a hassle though. 

You might need storage facilities the size of a library, too. :)

I find it amazing that in all those advances, we still have nothing as durable as the ole chiseled stone tablets. :)

Actually, I tell you something else.

I'm a fountain pen nut. I love them. I have lots of them. I use them every day. EVERY day.
I do another weird thing. I write on paper. I put it in an envelope and I send it to people.
You know, kinda like an email, but oldskool. ;)

Now, we talked about this among us letter writers. My postman actually knocked on the door once, to hand deliver a letter. When I asked him why he'd knocked, he said "I wanted to know who gets all those amazing letters. No one else on my round gets hand written proper mail anymore."

That is SAD.

The thing is, I dug out my old letters, written 20 years ago, when my significant other lived here in the UK, and I lived in Germany. My dad would yell "Write a postcard!" whenever I picked up the phone. So we wrote letters. Lots of them. Back and forth.
I read them a little while back and it brought a smile to my face, a hearty chuckle and a totally warm and fuzzy feeling.

Today, everyone texts and emails.
Which is very well, but it's not like having a handwritten letter. And those emails and texts don't generally get printed and saved.
So in 20 years time, what will those lovers of today have left to remember?
Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zip.

And if some day someone pulls out my letters when I'm long gone, and reads them, and sees what went on at the time, what mattered to me and what didn't, and they then form an opinion about what the world was like... then don't blame me if you get "The world according to Silke", just because everyone else emailed. :)

We're losing our heritage, our writing skills, our penmanship and - eventually - our history.
My letters are on decent paper, which will endure a rather long time. As will the ink I use.
I gently wax them, usually, which means they'll last even longer.
Our newspapers aren't on decent paper. It won't last all that long.
Our books aren't on decent paper either anymore, nor are they properly bound (as paperbacks).

It really is a shame, if you think about it, and I wonder what will be left of this digital age, in a hundred and fifty years.
What kind of legacy are we leaving, if there is no universal way to store something that will endure not just a decade, but possibly a millennium.

So far, I've still been able to read my ten year-old Poser content CDs. I've got a copy on my main computer's hard drive and on an external drive, and on a second drive left with a relative (just in case a home catastrophe wipes out everything in my house).

The one odd problem I've had with older CDs is that newer drives cannot reliably read directories nested more than four deep.  I haven't found anything on the net to explain this problem. It did spur me to backing up those disks onto DVDs, reading them on an old laptop.

As USB thumb drives and the newer solid state drives become affordable in the near future i think one should back up three copies of everything just to be safe. Luckly thumb drives are becoming cheeper and bigger as of current.

But USB thumb drives are even more prone to failure if there is an arc or interruption of power.

I recently reinstalled Poser 7 and had my Poser DVD (from the box) crap out on me; fortunately I had made a copy.  I'm glad this thread came up, because it reminded me that I need to make a copy of that copy.

I am in the process of making new copies of everything. I had pulled a ton of stuffage off two computers and put them on a terabyte external drive, which promptly failed on me. Was able to get most of the stuff back because I'm not using the other two computers much and there is free software out there that pulled back what I had deleted. I don't trust any media anymore which is a pity in this day and age.

Silke
actually books are on BETTER paper now!
problem wih paper in 60s to 80s was acid content os many of them go brown and crumble.
hence massive conservation work.

how about the archive CDs ... supposedly they last for a couple hundred years. More expensive though, but if they work, probably well worth it
http://www.mam-a.com/products/gold/archive.html

archival DVD too

Not news whatsoever. I've known for a long time that you're lucky to get better than about 3 years life out of a CD-R (never mind a CDRW). That's one reason (along with space limitations) why I gave up backing up onto CD-Rs; hard drives have much better long term integrity (assuming you keep them virus-free).

 You guys are scaring me. I have 2 external hardrives with fun movies etc. and poser project files. 
And i don't back up... i don't have money to buy more and more external drives for backup. So to backup you need to be rich?

Portable drives are dirt cheap nowadays. I'd buy one. Really, that's all you need: your data will be both on your main hard drive, and on your portable. And you won't be burning disc after disc.

Of course, you only need to back up what you're afraid of losing.

Attached Link: http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/operating-systems/nix/news-analysis/index.cfm?articleid=1298&pn=2

Perceptions of this lifespan may be somewhat skewed by the fact that users tend to replace their computers/hard drives about every 3-5 years. A 5-year old hard drive has less than 5% of the capacity of an equivalent priced drive today. That means users tend to replace their drives before experiencing a major failure.

If a CD/DVD is unreadable, try reading it in the drive that created it and on an older computer. Compatibility issues may well be the culprit. Newer drives are optimized for fast disk burns compared to older drives.

A few years ago, I backed up 100 of my old Poser content CDs (upwards at that time to seven years old) and did not have a single unreadable disk (mostly TDK brand).  I've had one hard drive crash out of about ten internal hard disks I've owned over the years (on a 7 yr-old computer). My experiences won't match everybody's, but it makes me leary about betting that a hard drive is the best means of archiving digital data.

The jury is not yet out on external hard drives because consumer priced models haven't been around all that long. The oldest ones tend to get mothballed before they reach their terminal lifespan because of the speed at which larger drives hit the markets.

The scarier part of today's large drives is that a loss can mean losing over a terabyte of data.

Quote - This article says the nominal lifespan of hard drives is roughly five years.

Perceptions of this lifespan may be somewhat skewed by the fact that users tend to replace their computers/hard drives about every 3-5 years.

People like us tend to. Many people don't. And that's why I find that five year statement pretty sketchy. Moreover, if you have data on two drives (your computer's and your portable/external), it's a no-brainer that if one dies, you back up the other one.

Something else to keep in mind: a tech can usually grab data from a hard drive in an emergency. Good luck ever recovering data from a disc.

Quote - Actually, I tell you something else.

I'm a fountain pen nut. I love them. I have lots of them. I use them every day. EVERY day.
I do another weird thing. I write on paper. I put it in an envelope and I send it to people.
You know, kinda like an email, but oldskool. ;)

Now, we talked about this among us letter writers. My postman actually knocked on the door once, to hand deliver a letter. When I asked him why he'd knocked, he said "I wanted to know who gets all those amazing letters. No one else on my round gets hand written proper mail anymore."

That is SAD.

The thing is, I dug out my old letters, written 20 years ago, when my significant other lived here in the UK, and I lived in Germany. My dad would yell "Write a postcard!" whenever I picked up the phone. So we wrote letters. Lots of them. Back and forth.
I read them a little while back and it brought a smile to my face, a hearty chuckle and a totally warm and fuzzy feeling.

Today, everyone texts and emails.
Which is very well, but it's not like having a handwritten letter. And those emails and texts don't generally get printed and saved.
So in 20 years time, what will those lovers of today have left to remember?
Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zip.

And if some day someone pulls out my letters when I'm long gone, and reads them, and sees what went on at the time, what mattered to me and what didn't, and they then form an opinion about what the world was like... then don't blame me if you get "The world according to Silke", just because everyone else emailed. :)

We're losing our heritage, our writing skills, our penmanship and - eventually - our history.
My letters are on decent paper, which will endure a rather long time. As will the ink I use.
I gently wax them, usually, which means they'll last even longer.
Our newspapers aren't on decent paper. It won't last all that long.
Our books aren't on decent paper either anymore, nor are they properly bound (as paperbacks).

It really is a shame, if you think about it, and I wonder what will be left of this digital age, in a hundred and fifty years.
What kind of legacy are we leaving, if there is no universal way to store something that will endure not just a decade, but possibly a millennium.

Bravo to you, you should leave your letters to a museum when you go to the mighty unknown for the kids of the future to see..lol

I trusted my external hd and have since put stuffage on another, but will never trust it completely. Will be backing up on dvd, external hd and on at least one computer. Still don't know the true extent of my loss. My story is...don't  just use one source and you'll probably be fine.   8^)

As long as I can finish my movie before my Hardrive dies, I"m good!! hehehe

Anybody use these on line backup companies..carbonite etc?  $50.00 a year  unlimited..????