Sponsor's Message

Did you ever note how such guarantees are usually very careful not to mention exactly whose lifetime they're talking about?

And if you've ever had to claim on such a guarantee you may be surprised to find that sometimes the "lifetime" of a product is actually the length of time it takes before it breaks.

These warranties are not uncommon in the computer industry either. I seem to recall numerous different brands of floppy disks touting that they had a "lifetime guarantee."

Now I know that floppies don't last forever (or even six months these days) but I suspect that most manufacturers offering these wonderful assurances of quality are banking on the fact that it's really not worth your bother to claim for a disk costing less than a dollar.

However, as we all know, floppy disks are yesterday's media -- today most people use CDR or CDRW disks for copying files from their hard drives for transport or backup.

No doubt you've got a lot of your most valuable data and copies of key programs safely stored on CDR right now -- or have you?

Did you actually bother to check and see that the CDR disks you're using retain the data stored on them for more than a few months?

If not, you could be in for a bit of a shock.

Right now on a local newsgroup there's some discussion about one brand of CDR that appears to have a very short memory when used with some burners.

Imagine going back to retrieve an important file from your backups only to discover that the disk is now completely unreadable -- as are all the disks of that brand you wrote to more than 6 months ago.

So how can you tell which disks are going to last and which disks aren't?

Well price might be a good place to start -- but it's no guarantee.

While it's fairly likely that the spindle of 100 disks you paid $49 recently are not "premium quality" and therefore more likely to fade with time, there's no guarantee that the ones you paid $1 each for will be much better.

And even buying a "brand-name" such as Sony doesn't mean that the disks you bought today are exactly the same as the Sony ones you bought a year ago.

Common concensus is that "gold" disks are longer-lasting than those with an aluminium coating and I have a little cache of Kodak DataScience discs that I bought a few years ago which have a warranted lifetime far beyond my own. If I've got something very important to back-up or store, these are the disks I use and I've never had a single failure, even after three or four years.

What are your experiences? Have you lost data to faded CDRs?

Lighten Up
Come on folks, the lighten-up folder's running a bit low again, get your favourite links in for next week.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a group of terrorists in a van tried to ram a fighter-jet. Well these guys weren't terrorists but I think you'll get the idea which would come off second-bsed.

Captain Kirk would be proud of this analysis which proves that The Enterprise really could travel quite fast indeed.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!