Posted by tonewheeljackson on 04/21/06 13:46

>>Trouble with both DVD's and CD's is they are quite vulnerable to damage,
>>and when damaged are unrepairable. I've got tape archived from 20 years
>>ago and it's still OK

You know I've been reading these arguments on usenet for many years
now, and every time they come up one important thing has changed: the
amount of digital data you can pack onto a single disk.

I'm a musician and I have old recordings of me playing stretching back
to the 70's. Initially they were all on cassette, about 40 of them.
About 5 years ago I copied the cassettes to wav files on data CD -
again probably about 40 in number. This took me a huge amount of time
and involved careful listening to make sure I didn't overcook the
copying level etc.

Over the past couple of months I have again transferred the recordings
from the 40 CD's onto about 10 DVD's. This was MUCH quicker than last
time because I just copied the wav files so no listening was required.
Because I only have 10 disks to worry about now, I burned 2 copies of
each one.

I just read the other day that the next generation DVD will hold 50Gb.
This means I will probably get my entire archive in wav format on *ONE
DISK*. I might make 4 or 5 copies of that disk, so who cares if one
gets damaged? It will also be an easy half-hour job to recopy the disk
to fresh media every year if I want to, so I won't really have to worry
about damage or aging, especially if I keep the old copies.

Who wants to speculate how much we will fit on a single disk 10 years
from now? I see this going only one way.

TWJ

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