Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Data rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, being stored not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read."

Your data is important. From bank records to movies to precious pictures, you probably store a lot of that stuff on your computer. Some of us, including some who have learned the hard way, back up our data. But unfortunately, simply backing up or archiving data is not enough. As time goes on, all archival media degrades from old school paper and photos to Travan tapes and punch cards. Sometimes even the technology to access that media gets lost. David Pogue raises the concern that few to none are working on develop a long term storage technology. One specialist even recommends migrating your data to a newer medium every 5-10 years! I don't know if I have the resources and time to do that for the rest of my life, but I do have data that I've kept for the past 15-20 years that's gone through several media changes. Has anyone come up with a novel way of long term storage?

We've talked about the issue of old home-burnt CDs and DVDs no longer being readable before on this site, but I did something this week that you may want to emulate: if you have CDs or DVDs, especially ones that contain a fully produced end product (like a DVD with menus), use ImgBurn to rip ISO files of the discs. An ISO is basically just an image of the disc - a big file that, if burned back to a DVD or CD using the proper program, gives you an exact duplicate of the disc. ImgBurn is a free program (but do donate if you use it and like it - I did) that makes the task of both ripping and burning disc images wonderfully simple.

Over the past ten years or so, I've created a handful of wedding DVDs for friends, and last week I thought "You know, if I'm the keeper of the master copy, I should make sure these never fade away" and I ripped them all to ISO files. It's a good thing I did that, because the oldest of the DVDs (about eight years old) gave me a few read errors on one computer - which likely means it's starting to degrade. It's kind of mind-blowing how fragile home-burnt CDs and DVDs can be - you should trust nothing to them, always having a solid backup of the information on them (hopefully on a hard drive).