I agree Dwight re. long term, stable electronic storage media.  RAID,
clustered environment, mirrored servers in a separate building, etc. we
have all sorts of redundance for records and data in our electronic
records system here.  Nevertheless, I still keep my eyes peeled for the
invention and development of a "perfect" long-term electronic media for
historic council records; one that will have a good chance of surviving
nuclear war; perhaps stored in a safe inside one of Hugh's vaults.

Regarding CDs and DVDs; perhaps I have just been fortunate.

Peter, I was very surprised with the CD that my brother Bob's dog
played with and bit.  From the way I understand CDs to work I was
surprised one file was bad but all the others were fine.  By the way,
that dog is a little bit of Heinz 57; she looks to have some collie and
some yellow lab in her.

Another story regarding media.  When I lived in North Carolina one of
my contacts (client) was in the Nuclear Generation Dept.; he was an
engineer who had been with Duke for many decades.  When he was a young
man he played in a band; torchlight music.  Think they called their band
the LampLighters; something like that.  He had a bunch of reel tapes
from the 50s that he and his band recorded.  He had stored them in a
paper grocery sack in the basement den of his air conditioned house for
40 years or so.  Like many young troops stationed in Asia in the early
70s, I put together a killer component "quad" stereo system; 200-watt
amp (JVC), receiver/tuner (JVC), reel-to-reel tape deck (TEAC A-4300),
cassette tape deck (Marantz), speakers (4 Bose 901s; 2 Bose 501s; later
I added a pair of Pioneer CS99A directionals I hooked up in another
room).  Shooting the breeze with that client one day he mentioned his
music.  I told him to bring them to me and I would see what I could do. 
He did and I took the reels home.  The mag tape in the reels were in
plastic cases, and in surprisingly good shape.   They were mono (single
track; recorded in the 1950s), but played fine.  I split the signal into
stereo, scrubbed them through my Dolby noise reducer, and dubbed the
music onto cassette tapes.  They came out very, very good.  The client
was happy, he had his music from his band on a media he could play on a
relatively modern player.  If I saw him now I would offer to digitize
his music and dub it onto CD and MP3 for him.

Before any stereophiles ask, I later bought a house on Lake Norman
(north of Charlotte) and moved in 1994.  There was a big oak tree in the
back yard (lake side of the house) and lightning hit it in June, 1996. 
We were not at home but the lightning arced from the tree (which
survived; only lost some bark) into the walkout basement living room;
nailed my TV, VCR, and my stereo.  I had them hooked up through a spike
and surge protector.  The lighting fried it; looked like it had been
hooked up to an arc welder.  Besides the TV and VCR, all my stereo
components were fried except for the cassette deck and the Pioneer
speakers.  I do not know why they survived.  Insurance paid off big
time; my components were worth multiple times what I had paid for them. 
I bought a new TV and VCR, and a fairly inexpensive little 60-watt
integrated stereo which had 2 cassette decks, a 3-CD carousel, and 4
speakers.  I sold my Marantz cassette deck, and hooked up my Pioneer
speakers with the 4 speakers that came with the little stereo.  Been
using it for 13 years now; even have my TV hooked up through it.    

Best regards, Steve
Steven D. Whitaker, CRM
Records Systems Manager; City of Reno

>>> [log in to unmask] 5/28/2009 9:29 AM >>>
Haven't had any problems with CDs, Steve, but recordable DVDs have
proven somewhat less stable.<snip>

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