I see there are even gold-layered DVDs which are inkjet printable. Interesting...

http://www.mam-a.com/products/gold/standard.html

People have to get past the analog mindset of archivalness as "avoiding degradation in perpetuity". In the digital world there are other considerations:

• Media longevity
• Reader + driver availability
• File format obsolescence

Therefore, it is not imperative that the media last forever; merely to outlast the other two factors.

Quite so. In the case of the private library I was working with, the collection is over 40 years old, and they were indeed concerned about 100-200 years.

The useful life of most of the content I deal with is perhaps 2 years. Standard DVD-R is just a little chancey, but HD is fine for that time range, IMHO.

It is important to recognize that a DVD-R that we burn today may be nothing in as little as 2 years, depending. A DVD-R with gold reflective layer is not only good for many more years, but also will have fewer errors in 2 weeks, good for sending to a replication service.

CD and DVD standards have a significant amount of error correction built-in. They'll work until one day the errors become too significant to correct, then that's it. The aluminum reflective layer is really starting to deteriorate immediately as oxygen infiltrates the DVD. Gold is *much* more inert, oxygen doesn't degrade it. There are some silver and silver/gold forumulations as well.

Why would you say HD is less chancey over the next two years than DVDs? From what I hear, Blu-ray in particular can be more fragile with repeated use than DVDs. I wonder how long before there's a gold-layer Blu-ray disc...?

HD = Hard Drive not High Def

Which can be abbreviated HDD (hard disk drive) to avoid confusion...