Digital Home Thoughts: Optical Media: This Too Shall Pass Away

"Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.) Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old! Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable."

David Pogue discovered the dirty little secret about optical media... it deteriorates over time. Even commercially pressed media may fail. I recently bought an out-of-print CD from eBay that plays primarily static. Fortunately, it was only a $1. I used to backup all my tax returns and supporting data to a CD-R. I pulled one out when I read this story and guess what? It's a good thing I have my 2002 return backed up elsewhere because I'm not getting it off the CD.