Life of DVD±Rs and HDs

Originally Posted by striped phantom

Since a lot of us are backing up our absolutely legal music, movies, and other precious data on hundreds of DVD±Rs and/or your brand new 1TB Hard Drive, I was wondering what the life expectancy of those are.

What's the best way for my data to last the rest of my life? Do I need to make copies of each DVD±R every 10 years? Should I toss them in the freezer? What are you guys doing to preserve your data?

I still think hard drives are best unless you fork out a ton of money for archival-quality DVD-Rs. But once you compare costs then, hard drives are cheaper.

I use a two disk RAID-1 array in my fileserver. I can't be bothered to burn only 4GB at a time at shit speeds to less-than-reliable optical media.

Jam it back in, in the dark.