Transcribe your CD/DVD Library to Online Disk Storage
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How long does information stored on a CD/DVD last? In the early 90's when the first CD-R disk was produced, the manufacturers estimated that the media has an estimated data life of 20-40 years, possibly longer.
Throughout that time and even today the press will discover that the media is susceptible to CD or DVD rot that will eat your information - audio, video or data - in as little as two years after it is written So how old is your CD library? Do you have a back copy of these data? What is the replacement cost of these data?
It has been identified that your CD library may have a shorter life span if your disks have been stored horizontally for a long period of time in your storage facility.
Now is the time to have your library copied to an online hardrive. Once copied to a sata disk, multiple archive copies can easily be generated. Did you know that experience has shown that the data from more than five thousand CD's can be stored on a single two terra byte disk that costs less than $130.
Now that the data is on a hard drive, what do we do with it? When we all started using CD's for storage, DOS was limited to eight character names. The names of folders were used to help properly label the various disk files. As an option, we can easily convert a folder structure to a multi dot delimited name.
The simple way to access these data is to search the listing of all files on your new disk. The Unix utility grep will enable you to quickly make a listing of all files with a given search string. This file could also be loaded in a database to provide for easy access.
What does it cost? Only five dollars per unit for the first 500 disks and then three dollars for the rest. Add another dollar per gigabyte for data. The transfer media and delivery are free. (Disk output can be either Linux ext3 or NTFS for Windows).
Arnica Resources has copied more than fifteen thousand CD's and DVD's, mostly Allied disks. By developing our own software under Linux, we can easily copy several hundred disks per day. Now is the time to transcribe your CD library to a hard drive.
For additional functionality, the industry program SeisInfo can be used to access these data. SeisInfo has an option that will "crawl and identify" all your online data. Feel free to give Ed Horkoff a call at (403) 263-5706
If you really want to do a complete job verifying your seismic archive we recommend you place your data in the SeisCap encapsulation standard, published in 2006. This can easily be done with C&C Systems here in Calgary. They can assemble, encapsulate and verify your seismic data. They will process to a "brute stack" to ensure that your data are complete. Give Carmine a call at 403-233-0808x375 for further details.
If you would like to discuss cd/dvd transcription requirements, send us an email at arnica.resources@gmail.com or give Kit Keyser a call at 403 243-0474