DVDs/CDs for Archival Purposes

[Enonu]

I've been holding off buying a DVD burner for the last couple of years because of the prohibitive drive/media cost and +/- standards problem. However, with 8X DVD+R out, 4X burners seem to be affordable, and there are a good amount of dual format writers out there. So now I'm out of excuses.

So now, I started looking through my burned CDs that I've had for years, and I've found some CDs have gone bad overtime. What's worse is that the data isn't replaceable So now I'm wondering if I'll be making the same mistake burning DVDs? Will my media eventually go bad? Shouldn't I just buy a large drive to backup my data? What about tape?

I'd appreciate advice and comments from anybody else out there who has thought about and tackled this problem. Thanks.

[CDRecorder]

As far as I know, the main causes of discs "going bad" are poor-quality media and poor treatment. If you get better discs, you will probably not have such a problem with losing data.

Also, if your data is very important, I'd recommend making more than one copy just in case. You might also want to check them periodically to make sure that they still work.

When I make data backups on CDs, I generally leave the data on a hard drive, too. This ensures that I'll still have the data if the CD or the hard drive fails.