On Friday 09 June 2006 19:56, Adam Bower wrote:
On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 07:30:12PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
Is this the case? If so, does it vary with the brand/type of CD? And does something similar apply to DVDs?
I'd just like to chime in and say that I've had experiences with CD-Rs in the past just "becoming blank" with time - including on one occasion several redundant versions of the same archive.
I've kept them away from light, impact, changed the way I've burned them, and everything else, but I just couldn't escape the unreliability of 3billion-per-penny CDs, so I started to fork out for decent media and stopped having problems (bar the occasional coaster burnt :-) )
I've found that if you buy very cheap media, you stand a much higher chance of losing the data. Not one to discourage thrift usually, but certainly where CDs are concerned, my advice would be yes, buy the expensive branded ones - and certainly never use cheap CD media as the sole storage for any data you care about.
I've kept to the same idea with DVDs, but I hardly burn to DVDs at all, so I've never encountered problems and never used cheap burnable DVDs.
HTH