I don’t think its quite worth switching over to until single layer Bluray discs drop below five times what it does for single layer DVD+Rs.

I’ve seen those 10 disc DVD cases before. They work just like normal DVD cases that have the tray in the middle, but these have four double sided trays. They aren’t excessively thin and shouldn’t be an issue, although rather expensive for just a DVD case.

Buy one and see if you like it.

As for easy error correction software, I don’t know of any. I wish I could suggest one, but its rather difficult to do this without also using a form of forward error correction.

I wish someone would write a program to automate using PAR2 for this purpose. I use PAR2, but it is far from user friendly.

- How important is the DVD case for archival purposes? Is it OK if the case is slim or for example contains space for 10 DVDs such as http://www.supermediastore.com/category/u/cd-dvd-blu-ray-plastic-case-cases?filter=Capacity%3D10+Disc%7C
I’m not sure if the DVDs touching each other would be a concern here.

- Do you also have a recommendation for newbie friendly software for checking the DVDs for errors?

Thanks

In my opinion, anything Sony, Memorex, or HP suck badly. They’re all B grade or worse.

You can buy Verbatim frequently at major stores, but why don’t you just order online through SuperMediaStore using the links I provided in the article?

Not only this, this is sealed onto the disc, which means several magnitudes of order more surface area for the seal to fail and allow oxygen in to oxidize the data layer and make it useless.

I can take a commercially produced music CD out of a music store and ruin it with no great effort.

DVDs and Blurays (of all kinds) however sandwich the data layer between two polycarbonate layers, and seal the edges of the layers together. You cannot accidentally scrape through the top anymore than you can the bottom.

Due to this very important fact, I can’t suggest CD-Rs except for an absolutely needed basis (such as the target reading device can’t do DVDs, such as a music CD player or a very old computer). Archival storage on CDs is kind of insane.

I would have expected CD-Rs to be both more reliable and more durable for two simple reasons:

1) Simple scaling laws — CD data is physically bigger, more molecules of dye per bit, wider tracks, etc. This also affects the tolerances needed on the reading and writing equipment.

2) More manufacturer experience — CDs are a long standing standard, surely we know how to make good ones by now.

I appreciate that even if this is true, one still might prefer DVDs, because of the much larger capacity (and DVD media are practically the same price as CD media nowadays). But in my case, the volume of data is small enough that cost per capacity isn’t much of a factor.

So, I’m asking whether, given data that would easily fit on either, whether there are any reasons to prefer DVD+R over CD-R (or at least, any reasons that impact durability of the data).

Yes, I use the Sanford Sharpies for CD/DVDs. They do stick to thermal printable discs quite well, just make sure it dries and you don’t accidentally scrape it off (it is difficult, but can be done).

CompactFlash seems to be a much superior format, especially since it speaks ATA (which, among other things, means I can plug it into a standard IDE plug using a mechanical socket adapter).

They do make extremely expensive industrial/military spec CF cards that can survive insane temperatures and use SLC flash (which means you can’t realistically write them to death), and also can store data unpowered for significantly long times.

This is not an archival solution, but still rather interesting to note.

I’ll update the article to cover Blu-ray when Taiyo Yuden starts producing them. Verbatim already does, but I’d still wait for TY.

That said, the sucker appears to be slow by today’s standards, topping out at 4X.

I’m afraid, too, that I have to agree with you about the lack of suitability of current non-disc data storage formats, most notably FLASH. Being charge-based, unless rewritten on a regular basis, FLASH memory degrades fairly rapidly – while I’ve had memory cards from cameras that I could read without issue two, or even three years after the pictures were taken, this is more of an exception than the rule.

I do like the SD form factor, though,and regret that there aren’t more durable formats that use it – what I wouldn’t give for a plain old-school PROM with that kind of capacity – imagine a PROM based 16 or 32 GB SDHC card – now THAT would come a lot closer to approaching archival storage.

Thanks again for writing the article – I’ve adopted TY+R media almost exclusively since I first read it over two years ago. I do hope that you’ll update it to include Blu-ray soon, though, as I do indeed have volumes of data to back up that are measured in terabytes – but no enterprise level budget to do it, or to spend in a constant migration to newer media.

As long as the ink from the pen is dry, it should be difficult to remove it.

I have those discs and when I check them in DVD Identifier it says:
Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. MCC 02RG20
How can you say that Verbatim doesn’t manufacture them and who does in that case?
And were have you got that info from?

I want to thank Patrick and all who have contributed here for their expertise, which has been invaluable in educating and helping me to arrive at a quality solution for my archiving needs.