Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?
Do BDXL discs have greater longevity than other types of optical media?<p>Back in 2000, our studio switched from archiving our audio recordings on DAT to CD-R. Thinking the greatest threats were loss and scratches, they made three copies of every disc and stored them in different locations. Around 2007, all of those CD-R discs started becoming unreadable around the same time.<p>Video recordings were archived to DVD-R starting in 2003 with the same three copy approach. In 2009, after having successfully rescued all our audio recordings on to RAID5 network attached storage, we weren't so lucky with saving our early DVD-R data.<p>I always assumed the reason DVD-R discs lasted less time than CD-R discs before chemical decomposition was because of the greater density, but I never looked into it enough to know for sure.<p>I have to imagine if Amazon is indeed doing this, they have some sort of plan in place to write all data to fresh optical media every five years or so. If so, that would create a very different cost equation.