[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 08:09:17PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:

> Forever is an awfully long time!  I recommend recording and archiving
> uncompressed, and only transferring to a medium which uses compression when
> it's time to play it back.  If you can't directly record uncompressed,
> record analogue and *then* transfer to uncompressed digital storage.
> 
> Do *not* optimise your recording for $medium.  There will come a time when
> you can no longer play it back, not because the medium has decayed, but
> because the playback equipment simply doesn't exist.  Instead, optimise for
> the best data capture you can manage, which you can then convert into
> whatever the playback medium flavour of the month^Wdecade is.

I doubt we will ever see the day when we can't play back film.  Even if the
playback equipment for film stops existing, it is so easy to build new 
equipment.
 
> in existence of historically valuable events.  Even CDs and DVDs aren't
> good enough - there will come a time when there are no working CD players,
> or the CDs have decayed beyond salvage - so the solution now is to store
> everything on hard disk, in the knowledge that it'll all have to be
> transferred to new media sooner or later.  At least hard disk storage is
> cheap and easy, and most importantly, it's trivially easy to add items (so
> people aren't tempted to just not bother archiving) and easy to pull
> copies from the archives once they're properly indexed.  I believe that
> all *new* programming gets archived automagically, but there is a staff
> spending all their time digitising and indexing older items.

I personally think archival quality CD-Rs are going to be around for a long,
long time.  Unlike many other things that have bit the dirt, CD-Rs have a
huge mass acceptance. Even larger than 5.25" disks did. You just need to pay 
attention to when they start to fade from popularity, then trasfer.  But, you
do need to use a standard file format on CDs or you could run into problems.

The thing I like about good CD-Rs is they don't fade like magnetic media does.
If you are going to use harddrives, you really should make sure the data gets
refreshed periodically, like every other year or so.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd