Several months ago I read that CD-R’s and DVD-R’s won’t last as long as most people orginally thought. The personally recorded disks may only be good for 3-5 years. No one knows. I have been using CD-R’s and more recently DVD-R’s as my only form of backup of my computer data.
I keep everything on the computer now a days so those backup’s are important. Knowing these CD’s “rot” I decided to take all my backups dating back to 1998, and put them back on a hard drive. I then backed up that directory to another hard drive. Drives are cheap so I figure if I keep all my crap on 2 drives I will be safe from problems. Or so I hope. I took some of the really old backups and destroyed the CD’s. I still have my recent DVD’s of backup’s for 2002-2004, but older stuff is getting destroyed since I don’t really need the CD’s with them back on disk. I use a Lacie firewire drive with 200 gig of storage space.
I also decided to buy a new Firewire drive every year for backup’s of crap. I realized that I bought my 200-gig drive less than a year ago and I have only like 50-gig’s left. It is cheaper to buy a new drive than to worry about removing crap off the existing one when it gets filled up.
I still have some more archiving to do, but I am getting things cleaned up virtually and physically before I start packing to move!