At 03:03 PM 5/8/01, you wrote:
>Dear List members
>One of the options for long term storage of information is CDR.   The
>British Antarctic Survey provided the following notice about the dangers of
>relying on this medium. Have there been other observations on deterioration
>of CDR? or suggestions for precautionary measures?
>Baruch Spiro

<snip>

Great question! From breifly searching Google and the appropiate newsgroups
there seems to be no end of discusion surrounding the subject. The best,
somewhat balanced opinion I found was in the CD-R FAQ - Media section at

  http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7

Basically, if treated with care they *could* outlive you, and most
certainly outlive the life of any device that could read them. (sure, maybe
some of your 20 year old 8" floppies are still readable, but what are you
going to read them with?) If abused, even mildly, they won't last 5 minutes.

When you get right down to it, even with all of our advances in science and
information technology, probably your best bet for longevity is how the
ancients did it - set it down in stone! OK class, pick up your chisels and
start writing...

Howard

Howard Sanford
919-513-3039
North Carolina State University
Dept. of Soil Science
Box 7619
3114 Williams Hall
Raleigh, NC 27695
http://www.soil.ncsu.edu/