Magnetic media has a specified archival life of about 15 years, but in
practice it is typically longer. I routinely pull good audio off
cassettes from the 70s and open reel tapes from the 60s and 50s.
Burned CD/DVDs have a stated archival life of about 3 years, but in
practice it can be much shorter and occationally somewhat longer. I've
seen burned media fail in weeks, days, sometimes hours...
Most average people simply to not care for or archive their media at
all, and I would be stunned if more than 1 or 2 out of a hundred of
those kids still had the recording your daughter gave them when they
are grown up. If she gave them a cassette, the vast majority would be
ok and if it were a vinyl record, it would probably be almost everyone
except those with butter-fingers...
Eric Goldstein
--
On 4/30/08, Jim Brick <jim@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Eric,
She, of course, cannot remove all of the background stuff but she
can (and
does) remove a certain amount of it which makes the playback sound
a lot
better than the original playback.
And she is well aware of the finite life of computer recorded CD's
and
DVD's. She tells the parents that if they want to keep the recording
forever, they will need to back it up and then every so often,
migrate it to
new media.
I have a lot of 1/2" computer tapes, reel-to-reel music tapes,
cassettes,
8", 5-1/4", & 3-1/2" floppies, and, CD's that I created a few years
ago,
that have gone south. Magnetics (tapes & floppies) and chemical
reactions
(CD's & DVD's) simply do not last. It is a fact.
On the other hand, I have family negatives and prints from the late
1800's
that are still in 'really' good condition. And they were never
stored in
ideal conditions. I truly believe that the current generation of
non film
family photographs are going to leave future generations with a
HUGE hole
when they want to go back and look at family history. When, on the
news, you
see people having to flee their homes due to wild fires (or some
other
disaster), when interviewed, what do they grab when they run out...
their
PICTURES! I guess future generations can grab their hard disks &
DVD's. But
good luck!
IMHO,
:-)
Jim
