Please read this page if you have a reason to store your data on your
own removable media (floppy disks, CD-R's, Zip disks, etc.). In what
follows we offer some guidelines on which media are appropriate for short,
medium, and long-term storage.
Floppy disk (short)
We do NOT recommend saving data to floppy disks for any purpose other
than very short-term storage or data transfer. Floppy disks are subject
to corruption by external magnetic fields. Furthermore, they have a
bad habit of not working on drives other than the one on which they
were originally formatted.
Zip disk (short)
Zip disks are more reliable than floppy disks and have a strong
protective shell. However, they are still a purely magnetic media and
so are subject to external magentic fields.
CD-R (CD-Recordable) (medium-long)
CD-Rs are optical and so are not subject to external magnetic fields.
While there is some controversy over their longevity, several of the
major CD-R manufacturers claim that their top-of-the line CD-Rs will
last at least 50-100 years when stored and handled properly. For a
guide to long-term preservation of data on CD's and DVD's, you can
read the NIST's publication Care
and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (or
here is a local copy).
Here is a summary of some of the portions
of that report that are particularly important. In early 2005 the
NIST subjected CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to light and heat/humidty abuse; here
is a quick summary. If you want to read
the complete report, here is the original
paper (and a local copy).
DVD-R (DVD-Recordable) (medium-long)
This is a relatively new technology and information on its archival
properties is scarce. However, as the data density on a DVD-R is larger
than a CD-R, it is to be expected that DVD-Rs will be more "fragile" than
CD-Rs.
Memory key/Flash Drive (short)
Memory keys currently store anywhere from 8 to 512MB of data. However,
they are not intended for long-term storage, but rather for transferring
data from one place to another.
