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Kodak Archival sleeves guard optical disc against UV Light and heat damage - are you backing up your data?

By: Simon D Young

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This week, I received our first consignment of the up-to-the-minute Kodak Archive discs pouches. These thin plastic wallets have been silverised with a metal finish and shield against damaging light and heat - the packaging states they are a 'metalised nano coated sleeve and safeguard against light and temperature and are environmentally friendly.

There are two factors to bear in mind when you are observing the archive life of recordable disc and in particular DVD, CD and Blu-ray discs - their shelf life and their longevity after recording. You wouldn't want to burn a media and then pop it securely into a case only to come back to it a couple of years later to accomplish a few precious photographs or a backup only to find there were media read errors due to Disc deterioration - no one, and in every occurance this would be more than a tragedy, having said that I still have CD's that I recorded more than 11 years ago and are still fine - they were not even purposely archival media and not stored in any particularly special environment!. Media shelf life is something you have little power over but the volumes of media sold these days means that each disc you buy should be relatively 'fresh' so to speak.

Burning discs for archival backup reasons is a separate matter from burning for presentation or short term data transfer between offices. The most frequent use of DVD-R at present is for archiving of video and audio tracks, photographs, images, etc, this means that you have to be entirely sure the files can be read or played back in some years time without the disc giving data reading faults.

Consider it or not but the actual lifetime of a burned piece of disc media whether that be a CD, DVD or Blueray discs depends on storage condition, if humidity and in particular heat are not within manufacturers specs disc will deteriorate and data will be lost as the burning layer on these types of media is usually an organic dye. Nonetheless, the strategy for tolerance on these specifications are fairly tolerant as far as CD, DVD and Bluray media are concerned. temperature as infrared and UV Light as UV UV Light are established to have the most significant effect on discs degradation, the simplest reason is to observe how a photo will deteriorate if left in the sun on a desk - much the same can and will happen to your recorded media if left to endure from these 2 detrimental effects.

This is for example why museums choose to keep their exhibits contained by cardboard cases often in temperature and humidity controlled environments, so short of casing up your burned media in blackout materials and putting them in the loft within a vivarium at a steady temperature you want to be looking for a different solution to defend your disc media! The new Kodak sleeves are made of a synthetic type plastic material that has been coated with metal, on the packaging it is described as a 'metalized nano finish}' and it looks like the pouches have been coated with aluminum or some other silver coloured metal. This gives a sleeve or wallet that you thats non transparent it’s this coating that keeps heat out as well as destructive UV UV Light.

So to the results - my results having examined these latest wallets from Kodak - The Kodak Archive discs wallets - I am confident that they are going to be a very good addition to the archive plan for those clients and users that have sensitive and precious data backed up onto DVD-R, CD and Bluray - they effectively block the UV Light from reaching the media burned layer and are exceptionally thin but hard-wearing. The sleeves can also be labeled or written on with a everlasting marker, all round an superb product and at around £6 for 50 well worth the price to make sure the future of your data, video or photos.

Your future archival strategy is something everybody should take into account but to be honest most can't be bothered, so next time you have some valuable data on a disc consider carefully how you will store it just in case you require to achieve at it not just in a number of weeks time but perhaps several years later. Disc drive storage isn’t the best answer to long term data backup, they are notorious for failing at the extremely moment you need that important photo or video - and guess what, you to disc! People have said that DVDR and CD are on their way out, but in this day and age of everything available in more and more bigger chunks of data and quicker download speeds are we moving to a throw away culture in that people consume their download ‘fix’ and immediately delete it or are there always going to be bits you could do with to hold on to? Well I say those treasured photo memories need to be kept back separate away from your PC, media station or mobile phone (all of which can and will go wrong at a number of stage or be lost stolen or broken and the present best choice to accomplish that is to back it up onto DVD, Compact disk or Bluray media and accomplish into the practice of storing these discs in your own archival technique, all you need is a discs wallet and a number of of the Kodak disc wallets and your photographic memories are safe for your future generations to look at and smile!

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Simon Young - Senior Partner
DVD cases and media

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