What to do about short CD-R lifespans?

[will7]

This is a follow-up question to an earlier post which cited the study claiming a much shorter than advertised life span for burned cd's.

By the way, that article's subheading is something like
"And don't count on hard disk drives either."

And DVD-R + magnetic tape have their own sets of questions.

Ok-- so you have some cd-r's (good quality media, error checked, blah blah blah.)
What to do? Is the only option to basically check them every so often + reburn them every few years?
Would this degrade the quality at all (for music files)?

[burninfool]

Making copies every couple of years is what I do.
As for degrading quality:digital doesn't degrade like analog does...after a 1000 copies the quality will be the same.

[redk9258]

If CD AUDIO is copied to a copy and that is copied to a copy and so on, you will get degradation. CD AUDIO does not have the same error correction as data CDs.

[CowboySlim]

If CD AUDIO is copied to a copy and that is copied to a copy and so on, you will get degradation. CD AUDIO does not have the same error correction as data CDs.

Rip audio Cds to hard drive, *.wav is a good choice at the $/Gb today.
Burn the *.wav files to DVD+Rs as data DVDs annually.

OTH, I'm having no longevity issues with my 40 year old 80 column punched cards.

[MediumRare]

If CD AUDIO is copied to a copy and that is copied to a copy and so on, you will get degradation. CD AUDIO does not have the same error correction as data CDs.

That's not quite true- audio CD don't have the additional ECC protection that data CDs do, but they do have the built in Reed-Solomon parity bits. You'll probably have problems if the disc shows copious C2 errors. Otherwise if you rip a CD with a tool like Exact Audio Copy, there won't be any degradation.

OTH, I'm having no longevity issues with my 40 year old 80 column punched cards.

Unfortunatley I can't find a card reader for my 42 year old punch cards anymore (outside of a museum) and they're a bit warped...

G

[CowboySlim]

MR, not to worry about lack of mechanical card reader.
You are it!
Just sit at your PC with a stack, read them visually, and type them in to WordPad column by column, card by card, etc..

[dodecahedron]

OTH, I'm having no longevity issues with my 40 year old 80 column punched cards.

just dip them, toghether with a few CDs and DVDs, into a pail of water, and you're guaranteed to have longevity issues with them ol' punched cards
=> make sure your roof is well waterproofed