I haven't because I've refused to use them for any long term data retention. I know they are a disaster waiting to happen for that application. My wife has directly experienced this, to great loss. She and a collaborator did an expensive observing run in Chile. Bandwidth was low from the observatory, so they used DVD media to bring it home. They burned two separate DVDs and checked both copies were functional. Some of the data was copied over back at home for analysis, the rest of the observing run left on the disk and put on the shelf. About six months later they wanted to reduce the rest of the data. Gone, from both DVDs. Sent out to expensive recovery services. No luck, the dye had faded. They had to re-observe those targets the following year, and time on telescopes of this size is rare and difficult to get. The largest problem with CD/DVD and image files is that it is a pain to migrate the data. Digital data that you care about should be migrated and refreshed every few years. With hard drives this takes a few minutes, unattended. With disks you have to slowly migrate them all. As others pointed out, there is media which *should* be better. But only if your drive burns the CD/DVD properly. The integrity of the data is based not just on the material of the disk and the dye, but also on the dye being properly exposed and fixed by the drive. Take a 300 yr disk and put in a drive not functioning properly and you'll get a disk that will fade in just a few months. How will you know? You won't, until you go back for your data and it is gone. Multiple copies, multiple locations, migrated with reasonable frequency. CD/DVD is just a poor format for implementing that... Ken
Message
Re: CD/DVD failure?
2011-02-12 by kwalsh74
Attachments
- No local attachments were found for this message.