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Currently sitting here transferring the content of old CDs to a hard drive. To save space, physically, and save me the hassle of looking for a specific disc among hundreds. And it's easier/quicker to make additional backups (this data will just become part of my regular backup set, now that hard drives are so ridiculously large). Anyway, the reasons don't matter.
I have some CDs burned in 1996 that are still reading properly (Kodak InfoGuard; the recording surface is gold-colored). I have some burned less than 5 years ago that are completely unreadable (various brands, with the recording surface greenish/blue/purple). I've discovered a long time ago that the faster you burn a disc at, the more likely it is you'll get read errors further down the road. So I tend to burn to disc at 4x and no faster.
Clearly the old claim that CDs will last 100 years isn't true, at least not for cheap, mass consumer media. I'm sure there's "archive quality" discs that do a much better job.
What's the oldest CD (you've burned yourself) that's still readable in 2018?
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I've got some old discs back from my high school days.
I went there from 2000 to 2006, so that's 12 to 18 years ago, and the last time I checked those still worked (although I don't check them yearly  )
The problem for me isn't in the discs though, but in my hardware.
I have an old PC that I don't use anymore and a laptop from work that doesn't have a disc drive, so I bought an external USB disc drive a few months ago, but mostly for reading music CDs.
Most of my data is on an external HD, which I really hope never dies on me 
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Sander, Sander ... all HDD's die, they are mechanical devices, so it's a matter of "when", not "if".
This is why I have a RAID5 NAS: i can - and have - lose a disk without losing any data. And the chances of two HDD's dying together is a lot lower than one on it's own. (But if they are all from the same batch, it's a good idea to assume they will fail fairly close to each other and preempt the subsequent failures.)
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Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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What he said.
Then back up the NAS. I've had RAID controllers go bad.
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dandy72 wrote: Then back up the NAS
And back it up offsite. You can ask a trusted friend to look after the backup set for you, or just store it in a locked drawer in your desk at work.
Given that most decent backup software allow you to encrypt the data, the chances of anyone other than the NSA getting at it are pretty low (and they already have a copy  )
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I don't trust backup software not to corrupt its own files - because then you're at the mercy of the software vendor to recover anything from these big proprietary blobs. Instead, my backup strategy doesn't get any fancier than robocopy. It's then trivial to get directly to a single file, and the risk of corruption isn't any worse than what you get with standard NTFS.
Then the whole backup drive is encrypted with TrueCrypt.
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dandy72 wrote: Then the whole backup drive is encrypted with TrueCrypt
And then you're at their mercy. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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My understanding is that each sector is encrypted individually (it's not an all-or-nothing thing), so if one of them gets corrupt, you only lose that small amount of data.
I haven't lost any data due to TrueCrypt misbehaving in the 10+ years I've been using it. Of course now having said that, I've probably just jinxed myself.
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I know, I should really do something about it.
Guess I'll put it on my todo list...
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In my experience (it's happened twice) - When you irreplacable harddrive with all your important data (that you don't have a backup of) crashes, you discover that the data wasn't irreplacable at all, and it's only a very small percentage you'll ever miss... 
That said, having a backup is not a bad thing at all... 
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Sander Rossel wrote: Most of my data is on an external HD, which I really hope never dies on me 
Be careful, electronical items that are not used for a longer period of time, and HDD's in particular, will fail. (Continual use is actually better for electronics than periods of disuse, - pretty much the same theory as for million mile taxi's.)
Unlike car engines though, electronics for some reason left disused will eventually just fail, and no: not sorta work or just drop a few sectors, it'll just not work at all, and unlike engines there's no flushing the oil and fuel line fixes.
So if you've stored a bunch of not very often used stuff, photo's, movies, music etc on an external HDD, and perhaps left that HDD in the cupboard for say a year or two (y'know, always meant to but never got round to lookin at it), there really is a high chance it's all gone. More so if there's a relatively wide temp and/or humidity range over the year(s). The pixies have bolted, the smoke is gone. (bin watching AvE & Hydraulic Press Channels on utupe.)
Best is if you have such drives, either do regular checks, or even easier/better (as someone else suggested) jam them in a NAS and leave them spinning.
As OG mentioned HDD's are cheap, set up the NAS to RAID so there's automagic redundant duplication; should a drive fail crush it and get a new one. What's a 4TB drive over there now? <100 euros? <50 on special? From new left spinning easily good for at least 3 years.
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I know, I know...
I actually use this HDD, so it's not gathering dust in a cupboard.
And it's also not really a back-up of my data (well, not all of it).
Man, I'm terrible at data 
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I'm pretty sure that original pressed CDs are what they were talking about when they said "100 years", not burned CD's, which I wouldn't expect to last as long.
I've got some music CD's I backed up in the 90's (so I had the copy in the car, not the original) that are still readable. Not tried with data ones: I transfered them to my RAID5 NAS ages ago.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I never heard anyone claim that home burned CDs would last for a hundred years.
I was so excited about CDs that I started buying discs about a year before I could affort a player (I was a student at that time), and had a friend copy them to CC for my use. When I finally got the money to buy a player, it cost something like USD 1400 (by the USD exchange rate of that time), but it was so cheap that it had only a 14 bit D/A converter.
I believe my oldest CDis from 1983, and it still plays fine. I do have a few discs from the first years where you can easily see that the sealing at the center hole is imperfect; stains of oxidizing are growing within the plastic. Those do not play well any more, but I did manage to save them to hard disk: I learned that CD/DVD units for PC vary greatly in their ability to read bad discs.
I have recently copied my entire collection of CDs to the harddisk - which saves me hours and hours searching my shelves for that one altenate recording of a given piece 
HiFi freaks, don't read the following: I also keep them on the hard disk in AAC HE format - I consider my physical CDs sufficient backup of for the uncompressed quality. (But considering the amount of work re-ripping 1000+ CDs and 600+ vinyl records in case my music HD is ruined, so I do have a copy of my music collection at the office as well!) For my 600+ digitized vinyls / CCs / recordings from the radio, I have kept the raw digitization before noise removal in uncompressed format, but the processed (noise reduced) copy I have for listening is in AAC HE format.
The problem with long time archival storage that I fear the most: I can make a backup of my 4TB audio disk (still less than half filled) in a single command. But fifty years from now, can I be sure that there is a player available for WMA files? For Monkey/Ape? ATRAC? RealAudio? au files? (and two dozen other formats) Can I be sure that the container format is known and dechipherable?
True enough: Files in all these strange formats were not created from CDs (at least not directly from one in my shelf). During the nineties, sound files you downloaded from the Internet could be in any of a great multitude of formats. For now, I have players for all the formats in my sound archive (some of the players are DOS applications!), so there is not a big problem. Yet. Not as long as PCs and Windows are around. For documents - mainly text, but also embedded figures - the problem is far more developed: I have got old documents in several formats for which I have only a hardcopy printout available, along with the file that noone can interpret. For some, I probably could still find readers / converters. For others I could not, especially pre-Windows formats, and even more for pre-PC/Intel formats: Editors were proprietary software on proprietary hardware architectures obsoleted twenty or thirty years ago. I suspect that lots of audio files will be in the same situation a few years from now: When people drop PCs, lots of the old sound files are lost, because the player is.
Then: I hear a loud "Who cares??" from the young generation. I haven't met one person below 35 who really cares for preserving old sound recordings, old photos, old movies. I have prepared some sound files (private recordings) and offered to children of those performing, and been told that "My mother loved it" - but that's where it went. The next generation didn't care at all. Not even for recordings of their own performances or activities. "I don't need that, I was there and know how it was!" (that's an actual quote). Noone asks grandma to tell from the old days, show the old photo and wants to see the old Super-8 movies or listen to the open-reel tapes from when daddy was a boy.
So if recordings are lost: It really doesn't matter. The only ones who might care are the professional historians. And very few common people have any concern for their work.
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Member 7989122 wrote: The problem with long time archival storage that I fear the most: I can make a backup of my 4TB audio disk (still less than half filled) in a single command. But fifty years from now, can I be sure that there is a player available for WMA files? For Monkey/Ape? ATRAC? RealAudio? au files? (and two dozen other formats) Can I be sure that the container format is known and dechipherable?
The solution to that is pretty simple: If you have audio in some file format that's going out of favor, then surely, there's a converter--there's already tons of them for everything under the sun, including lossless formats that won't make any conversion any worse than the original. I have to assume you don't let important data sit around for decades at a time...otherwise you end up with the situation you describe. But, I'm not worried about that.
I'm totally with you regarding the "Who cares generation". They already don't care about the quality of the audio they listen to right now...much less about older recordings...
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dandy72 wrote: CDs will last 100 years
CD's will, or at least if one is being responsible the plastic will be
...and just for you: recycled into IOT clothes pegs - still 'around' even if not so much 'round.'
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I remember from Tomorrow World (remember that UK CPians of a certain age!) the infamous CD's last forever and are hard (?) to damage the guy (can't think of his name) went over a CD with tomato sauce, scratched it, covered it in Jam, used the phrase 'Now, do you think this will play ?' turned it over and it played! now that always made a dubious, I could (and did) do that to old '78 LPs and they worked!. I have discovered really old audio CD's not working & CD Singles giving out over the years, with a 'tea' like stain under the glaze...
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Yes, those stains indicate poor production quality, imperfect sealing. For all but one of my CDs with that kind of problems, I managed to rip all the tracks to HD before it was too late (it develops gradually). If it can't play in one CD player, try another one. They vary greatly in their abilty to read such disks.
For 78s: As you didn't break them into pieces, they were rather robust. The vinyl records were terribly tender. Sometimes you could "play" them, sort of, after mistreating them, but the cracks and pops could be terrible, and the pickup might skip a track (a litte less than 2 secs), or jump back to play the same 2 secs again and again.
If you knew how to ruin a CD by scratching, you could fairly easily do it (scratch it along the tracks, not radially from the hole to the rim). Vinyls you had to learn how to properly handle. You never knew how much that is learned until you see young people handling vinyls, and you want to jump up and scream: You can't hold it that way! Be careful! (That also goes for lowering the pickup on the disc.) That fully proves that they have not learnt it. And you realize how much more robus the CDs are, even though it is possible to break them. CDs you have to learn to break; vinyls you had to learn not to break.
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Must be an age/environment thing with the 78's the ones we got from my Grandad (not the one who taught me corruption of rhymes) all seemed to have developed 'cracks' in them... the Vinyls all were dusty & scratched... Were 78's susceptible to damp?
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Member 7989122 wrote: CDs you have to learn to break
Nah, you just have to roll your chair over one as you're looking for it after it's fallen on the floor. 
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Any recommendations?
We usually go with Godaddy or Hostgator (Excluding cloud providers i.e Azure/AWS)
But I see other brands like:
A2Hosting
FastComet
DreamHost
Hostinger
Are these mushroom companies that open and shut down for their convenience?
I'm not able to trust online reviews, as most of them are paid & cooked.
A2Hosting looks attractive, but I'm not sure how well they do.
It would be truly helpful if you share your experience/Feedback. thanks
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I've used DigitalOcean: Cloud Computing, Simplicity at Scale in the past and was impressed -- easy to set up, fast, inexpensive, etc.
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Yeah DigitalOcean is very good.
But some customers specifically ask for cPanel. Particularly the old customers who cannot adapt to any new management dashboard UI. I guess Digital Ocean doesnt have cPanel option.
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all much of a muchness, all offer same thing but trying to be 5c cheaper than the other guy (and the extra discount if scroll down to end of the page.)
I found the most important thing to check was the price after the first 1/2/3 years -
most of the cheap ones can rise a few hundred percent and it's only say 2 years years later when the renewal invoice comes that you realise it's time to move again and again and again.
I gave up trying to save that extra dollar per month or get the extra 5 GB of storage etc, rather chose on:
1. been around a good number of years,
2. has a good enough rep (user comments - those "top 10" lists are ALL sponsored crap),
3. has a price that will stay pretty much the same 2-3 years later.
of course when checking user reviews there are fake / paid reviews: negative about the competition and good ones about themselves - not all are fake but most of those light on detail...
check the 2, 3 and 4 star comments, if there's many more 4's than 2's and the 3 stars mostly complain about something that won't ever affect you then usually it'll usually be OK.
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