>> The life expectancy (readability) is at most 10 years for DVD and CD's .
Whenever you are archiving data, you need to ask the question: what is the expected "Standard of Care". IMO, data archival is often a CYA proposition. You may think that the data is a bunch of old junk, but you are unsure about the legal requirements for retention. So you just take the easy way out and copy the whole lot to tapes or optical media. Then you send it away to IronMountain.Com and forget about it. If ever an issue arises (like a court order), you just recall the media and tell the investigators to knock themselves out going thru the whole mess. If a few of the media are damaged or unreadable, then it's just "bad luck - so sorry". You didn't overtly do anything to ruin any of the records, so it's not your fault. An organization can probably get away with this in most circumstances. For example, if one of Dave's NIH Study Files concerned a failed drug that never made it beyond animal testing, then I doubt anyone much cares what happens to these records. But if another of the NIH Study Files involves a drug implicated in many deaths (e.g. Avandia), then those records should be proactively preserved, even if that means copying to new media every 5 years. John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
