Many people are storing and archiving images of their work on CD. Not only family happy snaps from digital cameras but textile artists are archiving images of their work using this format. Many people are unaware of the problem, I didn’t realise that some CDs only have a life span of 2 years.
John Blau’s story, Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs points to the problems of long term digital storage. It is something many who are not so informed of issues associated with particular technologies would be unaware of.
Sorry removed the link as it is outdated and goes nowhere
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I wrote Comment 2 on this list and I would like to tell you that the only thing wrong with my CD’s was that the software used to burn them did not like Windows XP. I tried them on Windows ME on my old PC and they work. ( a sigh of relief)
I shall now make copies of them if my network will allow me, using Windows XP on my laptop.
The story doesn’t end here. There is a related blog countering the claims of this writer.”cd’s,lies,and magnetic tape”. He explains this topic to be a lie spread by companies who produce magnetic tape. Rumors and urban legends are known to panic the consumer. His rebutals sound reasonable to me. How many of us have 30 yr. old vhs. tapes still perfectly viewable? Same thing happens in other aspects of computing. For instance, my personal OPINION is that software companies are the culprits behind many computer viruses to sell software to protect from them. How else do they know what antidotes the virus??? hmmm….
I thought the reason my work disappeared from the disk was that they were created using the old laptop, Windows ME and I am now using Win XP. Obviously not.
Oh my gosh – I had no idea! Thanks for this message, I have to go and copy all of my CD archives now.
Yikes! That is scary! I had better transfer my image library onto flickr or somewhere…what else to do?
I can’t believe this topic has come up tonight.
I have a pc and 2 laptops, one recently died on me. I wanted to use some favourite images a couple of hours ago only to find that my laptop said there was nothing on the disk. I wonder if they can be retrieved somehow?
Thank you for posting this! I never heard of this as a consideration before. And I’ve had people telling me that digital images stored on CDs would be useable in the century. (I always argued that we change hardware too quickly to rely on any form of storage for long).