[nylug-talk] CD-R as archival media

[JW Park]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:31:04AM -0700, David Panofsky wrote:
> Ok, so I have some data which I don't need frequent or quick access to, but
> which I'll almost certainly need to use in the future.  I want to archive it
> so I can free up some space on my system.  I've been planning on just burning
> the files to a couple of CD-Rs, but I'm concerned about the possibility of
> data loss due to media degradation.  I'm looking for an efficient method to
> minimize my risks, and I don't really care if the data is stored in a standard
> or user friendly way.  Note, I'm looking for technological advice, not
> information about off-site or fire-proof storage, etc.
> 
> First off, I'm wondering if any of you have an opinion of how likely I am to
> have any problems down the line.  

In my experience, CD-Rs are pretty fragile.  I have bunch of it from
1996 and file loss runs at around 5%.  Interesting thing is most of
these discs do not have any apparent physical damage(scratch etc) to
it.  So I use parchive from sourceforge.net to prevent data loss.
Unfortunately parchive does not like too many small files, so I tar it
and split it into 10 meg chunks using split command.  This scheme works
well for archival stuffs, but if you have to use the files frequently 
it's PITA.