Should you store treasured data on disks?

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Ari Torhamo wrote:
> la, 2010-06-26 kello 08:17 +0100, Chris Rees kirjoitti:
>> Hardly news.
> 
> Really? I agree that large part of the users probably already know that
> optical disks typically are not to be trusted to preserve data for very
> long. On the other hand, if optical disks that are specifically designed
> for long time archiving and advertised to last at least a century or two
> degrade in much shorter time, that's probably news even to many IT
> professionals.

Man, I got an education on them CD-R years ago. Gold disks last the 
longest, silver are next, all other colors will last only a few months 
or less if you use them a lot. And that's if they are kept in top-notch 
condition aka pristine scratchless.

But yeah, the media is a bit slow on the pickup. It was not so prevalent 
then...

> 
> Unfortunately the BBC article doesn't tell which brands and disks were
> tested and which were not, and if any of the tested ones were even
> resonably good.

The most expensive should be the ones that last the longest - gold CD-Rs 
were commanding top dollar compared to the reds/blues/greens with one 
gold CD-R being worth a whole stack of the latter kind. But that was 
years ago...

Not sure how things stand today.