Thursday, January 12, 2006

Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span?

I'm glad I haven't stored anything I want to save long-term on a CD. According to this PC Magazine article the lifespan of Burned CDs is 2 to 5 years.

The expert in the article suggests you store data you want to keep long-term (30 to 100 years) on magnetic tape.

I think he is talking about companies that have lots of data to store (terabytes or more) since most consumers wouldn't have access to a tape drive now...let alone 30 to 100 years in the future.

You could buy a tape drive for a few hundred bucks but you still have to deal with data loss in the event of a fire, flood, natural disaster, future incompatibility, physically losing the device (in a move or theft) - etc.

I think the best option for long term storage for a consumer is to buy some web storage from a reputable company and keep your data on their servers and let them back it up for you. If you are short on cash you could use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Blogger, Picassa, Flickr or other free services to store data.

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