Just asking because the ones I tried to use didn’t print the borders so I wouldn’t know where to cut them :/

so far I was relying on hard drives. But hard drives have a high rate of failure (apparently higher than advertised by manufactures: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html).
I don’t have a raid array, and if I had one I would probably be less paranoid.

However, I honestly don’t care much if DVDs are better hard drives for long term storage, I care about having access to my photos in 20+ years. I think that having backups in 2 different media is much safer, and that’s the direction I want to go.

Recently I did a lot of reading in http://club.cdfreaks.com/ and a couple other places to find the best possible DVDs for long term storage. Everybody seems to agree on Taiyo Yuden, as you pointed out in the article. However it is difficult to find opinions about the new Gold DVDs from Delkin and other manufactures, and even more difficult to find comparisons between these and Taiyon Yuden. So I settle for Taiyon for the time being.

You can find them in DVD-R and DVD+R. These is another area of debate. I chose DVD+R based on this article:
http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media

There are also different series of TY DVDs (YUDEN000T02 and YUDEN000T03), I chose T02 because it is 8x, and that’s the maximum that my burner can do (the newer T03 is 16x).

Then you have to select Silver Lacquer or White Inkjet, and some other option I don’t remember.

And finally if you want them wrapped in plastic or in a cake box with spindle, the later being better. This is were I did my mistake (there had to be one! and probably more that I haven’t catch yet), I chose wrapped by mistake and I can tell you lose at least the bottom DVD because the wrapping doesn’t cover the bottom of the pack (that DVD is completely scratched, oh well).

I trusted the people on the cdfreeks forums about the resellers to use. This is the first time I bought from them. It seems like there are a lot of fake TY out there.

My plan is too burn at least 2 DVDs of each set of photos and store them in different 2 places (New York, where I live and my hometown in Spain). It’s a bit too much, but it doesn’t take much to do so, and I have peace of mind. I also plan to duplicate those DVDs in a few years, just to be on the safe side. That should be easy enough.

Best,

Luis

And that’s a hot tip on the smaller quantity CD purchases, Luis. I’m tagging those retailers to check them out. Are you using any particular brand of media?

As for long-term storage of the RAW files on a hard drive, I always do that for my personal work but not for our studio work (we do have hard drive backups for our Working and Final files). The reasoning will be explained in future posts so details can be explained. The short version is, if in doubt, back it up wherever you can. Everyone has a different level of comfort. My friend Bobby C. backs up to three different hard drives. He also has the worst luck I’ve ever seen with losing information!

I’ve been tempted to completely abandon CDs and DVDs for storage since hard drives have gotten so darn cheap and are fast to use. Seems like a no-brainer. There’s also a lot of fear that CDs and DVDs aren’t archival. But personally I’ve yet to have a CD/DVD lose information but have seen a number of hard drives go down. And when a hard drive goes down, years of data can be lost at one time. So I still go through burning disks.

Doing both sure wouldn’t hurt. More to come…