I have 200 CD-Rs with MAC 3.80F and FLAC files. They were recorded during the past year. I recently copied the contents of the first 40 disks to my harddisk and decoded to wav. Here are the results:

CD #2 - CRC error last track
CD #3 - MAC dies on decode of one track
CD #25 - MAC dies on decode of one track

That's a lot of errors.

Did MAC 3.80F have a bug that made random files worthless or is the problem with the CD-R?

Anyway, the burner used was a Plextor 8X. The CD-Rs used were all MrPlatinum.

I thought a CD-R could last for years when stored properly like I did.

I don't know which version of Windows you are using, but in Windows 98 I've encountered an Explorer bug that I first noticed when copying an mp3 from a cd to the hard disk. The "bug" presists even after my yearly format and reinstall.

In Win98 Explorer poops large files or many (too many) small files incorrectly on the hard disk and corrupts them regardless of which CD source drive is used to copy the files from. When using XCOPY the files are ok. I don't know if it pertains to your problem but if you have XCOPY its worth a try.

Is your computer overclocked?

Using WinXP

Computer is not overclocked.

To me it doesen't seem to be a cd-r(w) error. In tchat case you would have gotten an error message when burning or an error message when copying to your hd.

For my own interest - have you exprerienced the same thing with flac, or is it just mac?

The CRC error is obviously related to the CD-R medium.

The first 60 discs are compressed with MAC 3.80F, the remaining 140 with FLAC. I have only copied 40 discs yet, so only experience with MAC.

Depending on how and where you stored the CD's, the quality of the original media and the speed at which you burned them, one year isn't an unrealistic time for a CD to die. I have several copies of CD's I made from work that were stored in a caselogic case, have had minimal exposure to the sun, but were burned on media at the max rated speed for the media. No errors were reported at the time of burn and at the time everything seemed good and the disks worked fine. A little over a year later most of them are now coasters and give data errors when reading or attempting to install the applications.

CD's are in fact a fairly fragile medium to store data on and unfortunately there are so many variables involved it's impossible to say that a CD will last for a specific period of time. From the sound of it, all your original source files were fine, the CD's are just beginning to degrade and lose data.

G

Annuka, I always though that the Mr. platinum was the most crappy media around. Sounds like it is platin. Which is AFAIK the worst kind you can get.
If I could I would recommed something else but I haven't bought any cdr's since the taxes.

Maxell is another not-too-great CD-R brand.

iMation is not too bad.

platinum are the worst CDR i've ever used. stay away from them.

I purchased 600 and still have 100 lying around...

Do your drive spins at full speed reading them ? If so, it musn't come from the CDR. Most CD ROM drive lower the reading speed when the error rate becomes too high.
CRC errors can come from the Via bug, or other Mobo/HD bugs (for example, looking for Dell Optiplex GX-100 known problems, I came across a hard drive known to corrupt data with it), or from defective RAM. I experienced it, and the only effects were to corrupt VOB files from DVDs and crash heavy games after some minutes of playing. You don't want to know how I figured out, after about one month of hitting my head on the screen, that one of my RAM sticks was defective !

I also have some unplayable Monkeys Audio that come from very good CDRs. I even wonder if they left the hard drive before I found they were corrupted. They play fine until an error occurs in Winamp, at random places into the file, it seems. Monkey Audio decoder says the files are corrupted.
I don't know if they were corrupted from the beginning.

Maxell CDR's are varied.
The ones produced by Acer Media Technology for example are said to be reliable, and i personally never had errors with them. The model on the box should be "CD-R 80 XL 700MB PRO" (PRO is Acer, no pro is made by Computer Support Italy s.r.l, or MPO).

@Pio2001
Do your drive spins at full speed reading them ? If so, it musn't come from the CDR. Most CD ROM drive lower the reading speed when the error rate becomes too high.

The CRC failure is real. All my computers/all cd-rom drives spend a lot of time trying to copy it. The other errors occured during burning or by an error in MAC 3.80F.


CRC errors can come from the Via bug, or other Mobo/HD bugs

Luckily I have a SiS chipset, thus I only suffer random USB problems.


or from defective RAM. I experienced it, and the only effects were to corrupt VOB files from DVDs and crash heavy games after some minutes of playing. You don't want to know how I figured out, after about one month of hitting my head on the screen, that one of my RAM sticks was defective !

Please tell me this was Win98 or ME. One good thing about the NT series (at least from my experience) is that NT dies very fast on a RAM error.


Anyway, I am through with CD-R. I find it completely pointless to spend time burning stuff if it fails a few years later. I will be ordering four 120 Gb IDE disks and a IDE RAID5 controller tomorrow. That should provide a 360 Gb storage for my primary server. Backup will be done to a backup server once a week or so.

Imation (CMC-Magnetics) is definitely BAD.

But people, the brand doesn't mean a thing these days. For example Maxells are made by several manufacturers - some better, some worse.

Unfortunately, I'd say today's harddiscs aren't extremely reliable either. My IBM 45 gig failed in less than a year; my brother's Maxtor in just over a year; and my new 120 gig WD is starting to make similar clicking noises to the IBM in about 5 months. Sure, they have a warranty, but that doesn't mean you won't lose data. Hopefully your RAID does the trick though.

As for the cd errors, thats why I use a few par files on lossless backup cds. Usually only one or two tracks fail, which is enough for the pars to recover them.

Are hard disk quality standards dropping or what? My Quantum Fireball 20GB is still working fine after 3 years...

I believe it varies within NT (I mean nothing can beat XP).

I also had defective RAM once. It was absolutely horrible with XP, after switching back to Win2k on the other hand my sys did behave itself quite reasonably (stably), except those CRC errors after large files manipulations.

In my experience, it is not as much the media alone, but the media + burner combination that leads to bad discs. I have a LG 8120-B and often use CMC (Imation) discs and have yet to have one fail (2+ years)

Oh great, and i'm in the process of ripping 100 CD's to MAC 3.97 for storing on CD-R's......

This sucks

Also, I am convinced quality is going backwards in favor of price and sex appeal in virtually everything produced nowadays.
'I have two uncles who bought a mid-range sony stereo system in the early '70s.
Both still give extraordinary great sound. My moms midrange sexy panasonic stereo system is having slight problems with the equalizer after three years and her two year old philips boombox won't play CD's at random intervals.

I have a 7 year old IBM 100 mhz laptop, 700 MB HD.Not a single error has it given me, ever, not even a bad sector. I bought three HP's 486 33 mhz a year ago. I don't know how old, but two of them were as good as new (the other had a faulty harddisk) dumped them two months ago because they were taking in too much closet space.
However the 14.1 inch monitors that came with them are still in mint condition, I suspect them to be 10 years old or so.(i only bought the pc's for the monitors for $25)

And on the other hand, my year old HP laptop has 40K in bad sectors, recently I've seen two new monitors go bust.One was just three months old (OEM, warranty expired three days before it exploded, still we got a new one).

And trust me I've seen much much more new stuff go bust way too fast.

It's all the fault of ignorant average consumers who demand sex appeal, cheap prices and many futures, but no longivity (spelling?) , since they buy a newer model every year.

What would you guys actually recommend for archiving my music (mpc's)?

Currently, I'm keeping them all on my workpc's hd and a backup copy on my serverpc's hd just to play safe.
I also regularly lend my hd to a friend of mine who then copies my mpc's to his system so atm my music is on three hd's and I feel quite safe (Bylie knocks two times on his desk ).
But however I was planning to convert my mpc's sv7 to the new sv8 (when it's ready) format and then burn them, but reading the above stories makes me wonder if this is the way to go. I've read somewhere that some manufacturers are toying with blueray disks in a cartridge, this seems like a much safer way to store sensitive and critical data as opposed to the current cd-r's and as a plus can contain much more data.
In the meanwhile I'll just keep storing them on my hd's.

It was Windows98 first edition.

I recommend keeping data on "seperate" systems. MPC files are rather small, so disk space should not be a major problem.

"Seperate" systems are not accessible via Windows networking. I.e. you should not copy the files to your server through windows networking, a virus could easily destory both collections.

I copy with rsync/ssh myself.

that's still one of the beauties of mpc, it's rather unknown and I've only once had a virus and it only infect some old and useless mp3 files .

But if mpc gets more popular the tables will turn.

I had a bad stick of RAM in an XP machine half a year ago or so, and everything would work perfectly until I tried playing a game - then the machine would bomb back to windows or reboot after a while of playing. So I wouldn't necessarily say that XP dies quickly from bad RAM.

(Pardon me if this has already been answered...I skimmed kinda fast...)

One question - do you know, for certain, that these tracks were encoded and burned properly to begin with? For example, once I finish archiving my music to FLAC and burning to CD, then I again use FLAC to test the files to ensure that they are readable and error-free. (Actually, I zip the FLACs before burning them to preserve long filenames, so when I test them I first copy the zip file to the harddrive, unzip, and then test.) While it's too late to determine when the errors occured with your current corrupt archives, taking this extra "post-burn test" step in the future could help rule out possible problems.

As for other backup schemes, someday when I have plenty of extra cash I hope to have copious disk space for all my data, and I'll back that up via rsync to some remote machine somewhere. I generally trust CD media, but the accessability/convenience of hard disk storage certainly has its advantages.

Well on Windows 98 you can test your memory really quick.

Open c:\config.sys in Notepad and add the following line, save the file, shutdown, and start the computer:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys /testmem:ON

The command will tell Windows to test the memory used by himem.sys. If any problems are found you'll know in jiffy.

Hi.

Let me tell you how I make valuable backups on CD-R.

1. First of all, I make sure that I use quality media. (I prefer Verbatim or TDK produced by Taio Yuden)
2. I burn the data at low speed (2x - 4x max!)
3. After succesful burning I use Nero's CD Speed tool, to verify data on the CD (I do both file testing & media quality testing)
4. If I have the time, I do the same test on other PC, with slightly lower quality CD-Rom drive - it usually gives me (more) media errors that my CD-R drive.
5. If the data on CD is for example in RAR or MAC or something similar, I use the program's own testing algorhytm.

This way I make sure, that the recorded data is OK.
If I hadn't used that CD long time (for example 7-8 months) I put the CD again on test with Nero's CD Speed. If there are some new "bad sectors", then it's obvious that the CD is starting to degrade, and if the data is still important to me, I make a fresh copy of the CD.
The procedure seems complicated, but I never had problems restoring an important backup.

Now, let me explain few things:

Burning at high speed seems attractive, but I don't trust in it. Even with the highest quality media. If I have the time, and the data is important to me, I use 2x - 4x speed.
This is especially important for audio CDs!

If you have a message like "Burning was OK" or "Burning was succesful", this means only that the CD (or session) was finalised OK, but that DON'T mean, the data is OK. It's a pity, but it's true. I reccommend using options like Nero's "verify after write". I believe most of modern burning software have similar option.
Sometimes you get error on verify process, I don't know why. That means, the data WAS NOT written correctly.
Happens all the time.

A good burner is a good burner, but it ages with time.
I had Yamaha 4x4x16e - it was one of the best (and most expensive) burners by the time I got it. And it was perfect for 2-3 years, but at the end it started to make some problems. Sometimes it says "Burning successful", but the CD was unreadable, sometimes the CD was with too many bad sectors, sometimes was OK.
Now I have SONY, not so expensive model, but is "fresh", and gives me perfect CDs. I am happy with it.
So, I think, most of the time is better to use "fresh" burner, even not so expensive, than use expensive, but old burner.

This is my opinion, but because I value my important CDs, I never hesitate to take few steps more, but to ensure quality and long lasting backup.

So, for me, CD is good media for backup, but only if it is made carefully.
It's not like getting any CD-R, throwing it into the Burner, selecting 24x, and pressing START.
And Monkey's Audio has nothing to do with your problems, I never had ANY problems with it.



P.S. Excuse me for my bad english, I did my best!

Hey there :o)

This is an interesting topic for me.. how can we reliably store data? It would seem a simple thing to do, but from the looks of things here, each way has some major flaws..

I'm actually going to use it for a big essay I've got to write.. so, does anyone know of other ways of storing data? (which could be used for large backups like these..)

Solid state memory I thought about... it's getting bigger all the time, you could probably get 10 gig of storage for about the $1000 mark now? (so it's becoming more viable)

How does it actually work, and are there disadvantages?

And are there any other ways to store data, other than variants on magnetics & optics? :o)

Thanks!

Well, that's an extremely limited test. Most memory errors only occur with specific access patterns and otherwise remain untriggered. Programs like Memtest86 take this into account by running hour-long tests with all kinds of different access patterns to the memory cells. Even this can't detect all errors (you would need a RAM tester in "hardware" for that), but it's quite reliable already.

Hi,

I must admit that I'm a little bit scared now after reading through this thread . I'm just in the middle of ripping my complete CD collection with EAC+MAC and storing the result on DDS and DLT Tapes. Does anybody have experience with the quality/lifetime of these backup media. E.g. should I do a complete restore test after each backup run and should I do regular restore tests?
Normally the MAC files will be only available on tapes (DDS, DLT) because I use MAC for archiving only and mp3 (Lame/--alt-preset standard) for the day 2 day music. Of course I could rerip all the original Audio CDs, but well thats a lot of work and the main idea about using a lossless format was to do it only once.

Thanks for any hints and comments.

Regarding burning at low speeds,

These posts are from an old thread over at the r3mix message board (I was not able to link to the thread - it's called 'Burning, faster than fastest' and is locaded in the CD-R forum:

cd-rw.org
Posts: 1177

Re: Burning, faster than fastest
« Reply #8 on: March 10, 2002, 09:57:45 AM »

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This has been discussed before, but in brief.

Burning at very slow speeds using high speed media may result lower burn quality. This is due to the over heating of the disc, which causes smearing of the shape of the burned pit.

Still, I would not exceed the speed certificates of CD-R media. I am never in that much of a hurry.
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Generally tapes make for much more reliable long-term storage. If you've got a mini-DV camcorder or such you can back up data on it (about 10gigs per tape at 3.6meg/sec over firewire) using a program like dvbackup.

Josh

Tapes are not so reliable. It certainly depends on the format used. We use Colorado Backup at work, 340 MB uncompressed per tape, and the backups don't last more than 4 years. In fact, they are sometimes unreadable just after being recorded, when the tape recorder is dirty. With DAT tapes, a weared recording head can also lead to a poor quality backup that will perish in few years.
Recording in perfect condition won't last more than 30 years, after that, the plastic of the tape becomes slippy and can't be moved by the rubber parts of the machine any more. I had some audio cassettes 22 years old suffering this, other 25 years old in perfect state, which lead me to a 30 years lifetime expectation.

And then there's the problem with the Earth's magnetic field which will eventually erase any tape.

I know, but I meant relative to CD-R and multi-thousand$ scsi tape backup. Right now miniDV seems like a pretty good solution: cheap tapes, cheap recorders, pretty reliable. And the way dvbackup works, you can wrap the raw stream with as much extra foward error correction as you like (e.g. rbsep) before sending it to tape.

For 30 yr storage it's probably cheaper to buy 2 copies of every CD store 1 in a vault. But if you only need to last a few years until the next thing comes along, miniDV is the best thing I've been able to find.

Josh

Dear Pearson,

I don't know exactly what YOU mean for "very low burning speed" and "high speed media", but I can assure you, that there are quite a few CD-R media producers, which make ther certified 1x-24x or 2x-32x CD-R media in such a way, that "smearing of the shape of the burned pit" is something usual at burning speeds ~ 2x-4x.
In fact, I never saw such a media. May be I just wasn't lucky enough.

However, my post was just to show my way of doing things, and to convince readers that if they take a little more care and precautions, CD-R backups are good.
I didn't mean to teach somebody something.
You decide.


P.S. Today I saw on CD-RW.org, that 52x burners are on the way.


52x Burner - News from CD-RW.org

Actually those were not my words, but the words of mr cr-rw.org himself from the time when the cd-rw forum was at r3mix. I didn't want to teach you anything, sorry if you took it the wrong way. I just thought it could be interesting.

Are you sure ? I though that only variable magnetic fields could erase a tape.

This is a very long thread so if it’s been asked ignore this, have you used NeroCD Speed/scandisk to check the CD-R for unrecoveable errors?. I also would say to use a GOOD recorder + GOOD media with the recommended/ certified recording speed. After the burn is done use NeroCD Speed/CD quality Test to check it was burned with no errors at all then the storage is important keep away from heat, sunlight don’t leave it in the CD-ROM when not in use. Really I think good CD-R’s could last well over 10 years. I have lots of old CD’s 5 years+ I don’t know the burner that was used but Mitsui hasn’t resulted well Sony either in my experience. Kodak not only lasts but it can take scratches. CD-R prices are so cheap if you want to be extra safe you could re-burn every 3 years or another super safe a way to get ahead of errors is run nero CD quality test every year or few months if any errors are detected it would indicate the CD is starting to decay so re-burn. I think my methods are safer than any media & overkill for Kodak Media.

whenever I set up a new PC, or add a stick of RAM (even if it's not new), I always test the system with Memtest86 for a few hours. I've found several intermittent problems using this program, and best of all, it's Free software! After the PC has gone thru a pass or 2 of memtest86, I then put it on to some Prime95 torture tests for a day or two. I used to also run an Nvidia demo (treemark) to test the video card, but now I just run quake3 for a bit.

I realize I forgot to clarify: What was meant with 'low speeds' and 'high speed media' in cd-rw.org's original post was burning in speeds lower than the discs is certified for, for example 2x burning on a 4-40x disc.

Regarding Kodak CDRs: I prefer these myself, but anyone interested in them should hurry, since Kodak has stopped manufacturing CDRs.

The lifetime on DLT is very good, something like 50,000 r/w operations or better per tape. DDS isn't quite as good, but it's still pretty good. Personally, more than about 10 years seems unimportant to me. The Earth's magnetic field is less of an issue than the lifetime of the tape itself. You could probably slow the degredation by storing in a vacuum sealed temperature controlled case, but IMO that's overkill for music storage that I can generally recover. Using any of the large capacity "professional" grade tape systems rather than Colorado, Travan, etc. will do much better for at least 10-20 years. By then, online storage on a disk drive will be much more feasible.

By next year I'll have one of the 320GB Maxtor drives that will store about 1000 MAC compressed CD's. Since that's close to my entire CD collection I've amassed, that sounds like a better option to me. Hard Drive storage is actually more reliable than tape, especially if it doesn't get a lot of usage, since the drives are vacuum sealed. If all you're using a drive for is online storage of lossless files, get a removable caddy and pull the drive when you're not using it. The recent generations of 5400rpm drives have given me zero problems, run quiet and cool, and give larger capacities at a lower cost, really ideal for storing lossless audio.

G

Just out of curiosity, if you run Nero CD Speed, what's an "acceptable" number of errors?

Zero.
You can have some on average CDRs, that are used for temporary storage, but with a good CDR, you can get zero errors.
Note that it depends much on the reading speed. When the drive detects an error, it lowers the reading speed in order to reduce them. So getting no errors at very low speed is not a good sign. The best is getting no errors at full speed.

I agree - hard drives are the best way of backing up. Tapes die, and the worst thing is you never know when they are going to die. I use DDS-3 for daily backup, but after a year, I replace the tapes with new ones. Long term backup, ie where the risk of deleting files is low, is best on hd or magneto-optical (but silly money). The only cd-r I've found reliable are the kodak ones (or those baced on the same technology), but I still wouldn't trust them.

gdougherty - just one correction, hard drives are not vacuum sealed from what I understand

Out of curiosity, how viable is RAID as a storage method? I've heard the basics on how it works, and think it would be great for archiving your collections on. Maybe a bit overkill, but you stand to lose nothing if one of the disks goes phut

RAID5 is pretty much the industry standard for storage. Normally done with SCSI disks, but the concept works fine for IDE disks as well.

You need 3-5 identical disks. A RAID5 controller would be nice, but most OSes can create software RAID5 as well.

If one disk dies, your data lives on.
If two disks dies, your data on the remaining disks is dead.
You will still loose files you delete accidental (unless you have some undelete tool)
A virus can easily kill your data.

RAID5 is not a backup. You will need a second computer with plenty of storage for the backup. Alternatively you can burn worthless CD-R backups or spend the rest of your life burning quality CD-R and testing and reburning etc.

So you actually doesn't need RAID5, since you will have a backup anyway. But I like the idea of a secondary backup.

PIO2001,

So what would you think if I came back with four errors?

What I meant is to have the raid on the second computer as a backup! Then if one disk dies, you don't lose anything..