I think the key to markers is that they be acid free. I'm suspicious of
cd-rom in archiving. I've seen the sticky metal film that carries the data
bubble and I think they cd-roms have a life span of 12 years or so.
Remember the cd's we get are different then manufactured cd's. They are
composed of a plastic disk with a "metal" sticker adhered to the outside
whereas a manufactured cd is typically a metal disk encased inside the
plastic disk. The danger is that air bubbles can appear as the metallic
sticker expands.
    I think redundancy is probably the key to archiving. Several copies or
back up on a hard drive. Just stuff the files as back up every couple of
months and put them on an extra hard drive. You can get a big hard drive
for less then 100$ and use it for back up or whatever. I did this while
switching to osX. I installed osX on the new drive and kept my old stuff
backed up on the os9 disk which also serves as a way of rebuilding or
rebooting in os9 if I have a need to use an old program or run disk helper
and recover from a disk crash. This happened once when installing my 3rd
hard drive because I had the new drive set as a master instead of slave. I
recovered without a loss of any data thanks to the old os 9 drive.
    If you have a web server, you can use Transmit (www.panic.com) to mirror
files in 1 file with files on your server, so even if your entire computer
burns in a catastrophic fire, you'll be covered.

Sorry this is so long, I'll be researching long term data archiving over the
summer as I set it up an archival system for the data in the biology
department of my college. I'll share what I think would be the best method
then.


>> This quote from the article is definitely news to me!!
>> If you can damage a CD by writing on the label side, why do the print
>> rule lines on many brands
>> to write on?
>> Is this so sort of planned obsolescence? Should a CD maker know...not to
>> not to encourage writing on the CD?
>
> I think they mean a ballpoint pen. You can write on it with a soft pen
> without danger of scratching it.
>
> Liz Day
> Indianapolis IN
>