Recordable DVD delamintation
I'm pretty big into photography as a hobby. As a result I find a need to store my captured images for posterity and for boring anyone within arm and eyeball reach. I've got a dedicated external hard drive for this and recently purchased an external DVD rewritable drive to archive my images.
Sounds good, right? Yea, sounds perfect. Except this. I'm writing some DVDs of an event to distribute to some folks and using a major brand DVD to record on. For some reason the software/internal drive combination I have wants to lock up, this produced some unusable disks. I worked around the lockups and made my copies. No worries.
So now I'm fiddling around with the dud DVDs thinking what can I do with them. I decide to trash them after verifying they are bad. I have a bit of an artistic streak so I am thinking to melt one into some shape. I apply some heat from a nearby candle and I curl up the edge. Cool. Now, I heat it up a bit more and go to flex the DVD and to my complete amazement the DVD splits in two! I now have two nice, albeit, a tad mis-shapened, polycarbonate disks.
Good for art, bad for archiving. I continue to play with the rest of my dud DVDs and find that I can produce the delamination without as much heat. I can also cause them to fail structurally by flexing a couple of times.
No science, not scientific research, just observations. I'm not that trusting in the DVD archive concept at this point. While it's not a much published concern I do find some net activity suggesting that this may be a problem with recordable DVD media. I noticed on my batch of disks that the edges were not consistently smooth as I have been used to with CD media. I could probably split these with a razor if I wanted to.
My bottom line is this. Don't rely solely on DVD recordable media for archiving your images or any other data. I think external hard drives are the way to go. They are fast, getting smaller and more portable (can you say 80gb iPod?) and they are relatively inexpensive. CDR, which seems a lot more stable, is my next choice for archiving and of course there is still my tape backup subsystem. Damn, I thought we were progressing.
Follow up: I split one with a guitar pick... Not that hard to do...actually pretty damn easy. So what this means is that if you can get a guitar pick in between the polycarbonate disks, smaller stuff like moisture and fungus can get in there too, making your disks worthless for storing your data.
