I was wondering what is the best way to save my photos [ other than printing them all off]. I have them all burned on cd- r disk right now. A friend told me the cd-r have a life spand of about five years, is that true or is he just blowing smoke. I would really hate to lose every thing.
Paul

All media, regardless of which one you pick, has a finite life span. That is the reason why I use CDs and every year I make copies to new CDs.

If you treasure those photos, you need to embrace the notion that you WILL have to transfer those images to some other media when the time comes.

When will that happen? I don't know and no-one else does either. All the CD manufacturers can tell you is that, based on a certain kind of use, a CD or DVD, should last X number of reads and writes.

The main issue is not necessarily that CDs go bad (even still they can due to bad storage, warped, scratched etc), as much it is the technology readers/writers uses that changes constantly to squeeze a little more speed or a little more storage out of them.

I have 10 year old CDs that still work fine, and I have CDs that are 5 years old that I can no longer read with my modern desktop but that I still can with an old 80486 based system.

Your concerns are very valid but they have been dealt with in much larger scale by corporations via media rotation and constant testing/validation of the media used.

If you truly want piece of mind, you need to do the same: periodically re-test all CD copies of your photos. You do have multiple copies of your images, don't you? One at home and one some place else?

This testing is specially important if you purchase a new computer: it might have come with a CD/DVD reader that uses technology one or two generations newer than the one that you used to burn the original CDs.

Good Luck.

I was wondering what is the best way to save my photos [ other than printing them all off]. I have them all burned on cd- r disk right now. A friend told me the cd-r have a life spand of about five years, is that true or is he just blowing smoke. I would really hate to lose every thing.
Paul

Thank you.
That is really good info. I have a lot of old photos from the 20,s etc that I no longer have the original. It would break my heart to lose them.
Again, thank you
Paul

hi,
besides the issues of weather the cd technology will be around for another 20years or not or how well there stored and used or how well a cd writer compatability with various cd manufacturers ...

the quality of the cd is important!!! the quality of cd's, longivity and reliability, dependent on the material there made with!! IE; the kind of plastic, kinds of dyes and the reflective layer material... for exmple for archival some outfits will only use those cd that uses silver or gold reflective layers... they cost more but they generally last a very very long time...

this site goes into heavily on cd quality and which one's are good and which one are poor quality based on various testings...

http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_quality.shtml




Thank you.
That is really good info. I have a lot of old photos from the 20,s etc that I no longer have the original. It would break my heart to lose them.
Again, thank you
Paul