A frequent topic of discussion on my genealogy software mailing list is how best to preserve and/or backup one’s data; I’ve forwarded some of the messages on to Daddy, since he’s been in charge of the family photo CD. He recently returned the favor with a link to an article in Information Week. It’s a good article that sums up a lot of what’s been reported over the last few years, and the most important thing I noted was the finding that every unreadable disc the author had was “covered with a glue-on paper label from a print-it-yourself CD label-maker kit. Several of these labeled CDs were, in fact, totally unreadable by every means I tried (including special data-recovery software); all the data on those CDs is just plain gone. My best guess is the glue on these do-it-yourself labels interacted with either the foil or the dye, rendering the CDs useless.”
Check out the whole article for the full story; it also includes links to previous articles on the integrity of CD-Rs and CD-RWs.
Posted by elizabeth at November 3, 2003 10:03 PMVery interesting. I'm glad that using a permanent marker doesn't seem to affect the CDs. A Sharpie is currently my (lazy) joice of labeling most of my CDs.
Posted by: stepan on November 4, 2003 10:09 AMI'm glad to hear about the problems with CD labels...I backup a whole lot of data for my job on cd's...because of what you report, I'm going to make duplicate copies and label them as Stepan does. Thanks!
Posted by: Kathleen on November 5, 2003 06:38 AM