Verbatim Cd-R's are junk!!

Jim,

Cool!

--Mike

Thanks for the tip. A couple of years ago a buddy of mine in MA emailed me, saying what a great deal on CD-Rs he got at staples - $0.27ea. A week later another email arrived, stating that 2 had already become unreadable. oops.

Cheers Terry

Not unless you diff the files or md5sums between source and destination each step of the way do you really know if the backup is worth anything.

Readability of the CD filesystem is not an indication of data integrity.

You could wind up with nothing but a million copies of bad files without verification at each step.

and I

Just buy Taiyo Yuden from a reputable supplier. They are unbranded. Here:

I've used meritline, but not the second one. Meritline accepted for return a TY DVD+R stack that I sent back unused, after determining that it what the ill-reputed lot. So they are fair folks.

Good day!

Odd, my VB DVD+RWs state a lifetime warranty.

Call:

Keep in mind that what I posted is SEVERAL years old.

...Jim Thompson

But how do you identify them before you buy them?

In news://comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage they say that magneto-optical is better for long life, 50-100 years estimated.

Well, most of the time, manufacturing soon reads the files from the server and builds stuff. That sort of demonstrates that the files still make sense. No problems so far.

Worst-case, we can go back to the engineer and re-release the designs from his hard drive. We have another server drive that all the engineers use as backup for their work-in-progress, and *that* gets backed up to DVD weekly.

John

Thanks! But is there some way you can identify them before you buy them?

I did a search right after posting (always doing it backwards).

I thought you were saying that they only manufacture, and that theirs are sometimes what you get when you buy name brands. (Like they way you would buy Red Wing peanut butter, which is identifiable by the raised logo on the bottom of the jar, but sold as generic.)

is

Actually they claim a warranty of 50 years and the published estimates approach 100 years. We still make drives that can read 720 kB floppies, so these drives should be around for a few decades. You don't want to wait for the last minute to replace the disks anyway, if you need the data longer than a few decades.

Here:

Thanks. I thought you were saying that it was one of those manufacturers that Sony, et al, might sometimes buy and put their brand on.

According to the notes for this program, it's the only one that to the author's knowledge reads the ATIP information. He didn't look very far; cdrecord (both Windows and *nix) has a -atip option also.

Clifford Heath.

They might. That's the point. You never *know* what factory the brands get it from until you probe it in your drive.

So the only way to know what you are getting is to ignore brands and buy from a vendor that can give you factory direct media, like TY.

Good day!

I wasn't criticising, just pointing out a possible alternative, accessible to *nix users as well as Windows ones.