This from a Professional Photographer(www.luminous-landscape.com) that
has gone 100% digital for his work about Archiving.

***A Cautionary Note*** 
A few weeks after publishing this article I received an e-mail from a
customer, ordering a print of one of my photographs from 1999. It wasn't
one of my more popular (or recent) photographs so it wasn't on my new
storage system, one of the Firewire hard drives.

For some reason though (Murphy was at work _ as always) I couldn't find
the CD ROM on which it was stored. I told the customer that he'd have to
wait a week or so until I could get to my archive CD, which is stored
off-site at my summer cottage.

The next weekend, upon arriving in the country, I retrieved the disk and
was stunned to discover that the disk was unreadable on my laptop's
drive. Upon returning to the city, and many hours of fussing later
(along with some luck), I was able to retrieve the file, make the print
and ship it off to the customer. 

But, this made me wonder about all of my CD ROM backups. I have more
than 100. I checked every one and found that 3 of the 100 were either
totally or partially unreadable. These disks were on brand name media
(Verbatim and Maxell), and had been verified after burning. Fortunately
in each case the files on these bad disks were also located elsewhere
and so nothing has been lost. (That's a 3% failure rate in just a few
years. How many more will have deteriorated by next year?)

Scary isn't it? These disks were only between 3 and 6 years old. I had
assumed (and read) that a minimum of 10-15 years could be expected from
CD-ROMs. What's the cause of these failures? I don't know. Storage
conditions were almost ideal; in plastic jewel-boxes located in a filing
cabinet, in a normally heated and air-conditioned house.

It seems that just the way that your Ektachromes from the 1970's have
now mostly faded away, so too will your CD-ROMs, given enough time _ and
that time apparently isn't very long at all.

So, until a non-volatile digital storage medium comes along I'm going to
continue with my belt-and suspenders approach to back-up, namely a local
outboard hard disk for ease of access, and 2 CD-ROMs, one located
off-site.

Believe me, it's worth the bother.

***Sources and Solutions*** 
Based on the feedback that I've been getting from a variety of sources
the consensus from those that appear to know what they're talking about
is that CD deterioration is caused primarily by three factors...

 Poor quality disks to begin with
 
 Adhesive labels applied to the disks
 
 Writing on the disks
 
The most reliable brands are reported to be Kodak Gold and Mitsui. Felt
pens and paper labels and their glue apparently are all acidic, and
leach through the disks over a period of years, destroying data
integrity.

Best not to label or write on the disks at all, or only to use a pen if
it specifically states that it is safe for writing on CDs.

Make two copies of everything and Pray.








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