RE: How to Clean a CD....

Personally, I would not trust a thumbdrive (the little keychain doohickey)
more than a CD or DVD or even your hard drive. The thumbdrive is an
electronic storage medium, like the memory in your PC, so it's subject to
being corrupted by strong electromagnetic signals. CDs and DVDs (for the
most part) are mechanical--something is physically changed on the disc to
record data, and especially on record-once media, it isn't as easy to
corrupt the recording. A hard or floppy drive is somewhere in-between the
two.

That said, you really should keep multiple copies of anything that's
important and irreplaceable. You should also periodically verify the
condition of your backups and keep at least one set physically isolated from
the originals and/or other backup(s). It doesn't matter if your backups are
on film or discs, if they are all together with your originals and a
disaster strikes, everything is at risk. And if you don't periodically
check on the backups' condition--again, no matter the sort of backup--they
may not be usable when you need them.

So, you need to figure out how valuable your originals are (not necessarily
their value in $$), make backups of the ones you need to, use pretty much
any backup medium you have available that is adequate in size to store the
information, store really important backups off site, and check the
viability of your backups periodically (and before you need them).

In reality, the argument over which of our current digital media is archival
over a period of more than five or ten years is moot--in that amount of
time, readers (hardware and software) for current media will probably be
difficult to find or use. And 25, 50, or 100 years from now, the only thing
you'll really be able to count on for a good backup is a film or print
image.

Boy, I'm glad I don't do IT work any more!

-Schuyler

-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 11:43 AM
To: INTERNET:alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
Subject: Re: How to Clean a CD....

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Ed Stander wrote:

> Judy:
> I use adaptec "Easy CD Creator" to copy CDs. It came with my computer.
> Other CD copy programs do the same thing - ie: they allow one to copy a CD
> image to the hard drive. That image can then be used to make as many
> copies as one wants without resorting to the original CD. As mentioned,

Ed, thanks for the elucidation, but something else occurs to me. If I
read you correctly, you do NOT keep the original file on the hard drive or
any computer, but only on CDs? Perhaps wrongly so, but the very thought of
my precious unique irreplaceable photographs only on CD makes me feel
faint.

I back on CD just in case my hard drive goes blooey, and still have some
hard drive gigabytes in reserve. I suppose that's possible because to date
my photo files rarely go more than 20 mb (hardly a speck in the eye of
current neg action but enough for now -- and the original camera jpegs are
much smaller, I keep them too.) Am I still tempting fate?

Meanwhile, this discussion makes me think -- as long as the topic of
*cost* comes up, why not back on those little, I forget what they're
called, like keychain drives? As I recall their gigabytes are cheap too,
and they're reusable... (I use a lot of CD space to back work in progress,
as is irrelevant by the finale.) Aren't they more archival than disks?

Judy
Received on Sun Jun 26 13:15:26 2005