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Warnings/Issues/Information:

Should you store treasured data on disks? 

28 May 2010

CDs meant to last a long time may only good for a few years

Preserving precious data, such as pictures and home videos, on CDs and DVDs could do more damage than good in the end.

That's what the French National Centre for Scientific Research has found out after testing the longevity of the portable media.

"We were surprised to see that the lifetime of discs, some of which were designed to last for centuries, actually rarely lasted longer than five to 10 years," said physicist Franck Laloe.

"In the most severe cases, which were happily quite rare, the data on some discs lasted just one year," he said.

Unlike audio and video tapes that wear out with play, discs are read with a laser so there is no physical contact.

However, the surface which contains more than seven miles of data is deteriorating with age.

Varied quality

French scientists calculated the likely life-span of a disc by artificially aging it with heat, water vapour and light.

Scientists artificially aged CDs with heat, water vapour and light

They found CD quality varied even across the same brand so people willing to pay more for a known name won't necessarily get a better product.

"The brand alone doesn't tell you if you have something that is high or low quality," said Jean-Michel Lambert, from the French National Metrology Laboratory.

"Disc production varies. In the same brand we find discs produced by different manufacturers which means their quality and how long they last for is not necessarily the same," he added.

Also, manufacturers branding discs with their logos could be making the data on them more vulnerable to corruption.

No guarantees

Documentary-makers record about five hundred gigabytes of HD for a 52 minute documentary and need to have a way of storing footage.

Jerome Duc-Mauge, executive producer at Cocottes Minute, keeps rushes stored in a combination of hard drives and data cassettes.

But he still cannot be certain these storage solutions are the best options.

Jerome Duc-Mauge believe there are no guarantees on rushes storage

"This is a big drama, this issue of how long these pictures will last. We don't know. The manufacturer says to us, "Yeah, five years, 10 years, 15 years," he said.

"But we will see in 15 years, we'll see in 20 years if it is still here, or if it has just become a pile of dust at the bottom of the cassette."

There are a few precautions people can take to avoid losing their data. Mr Laloe said these meant being "vigilant".

"Every two or three years, you have to copy your archive onto fresh discs. And after that, because these new discs will last a bit longer, you will have to re-copy them after five or six years," he said.

Mr Lambert recommended spreading digital data rather than keeping it all archived in one place.

Recent CBS News item:

Almost all copiers made since 2002 have a hard drive buried inside the machine. Just like the ones in your computer, those hard drives store data and information. They store images of every document that is scanned, copied or emailed. This turns your office necessity into a time bomb. If someone is in the Identity Theft business, a standard used copier could be a pot of gold.

“The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms,” John Juntunen said, “that information would be very valuable.” Juntunen’s Sacramento-based company Digital Copier Security developed software called “INFOSWEEP” that can scrub all the data on hard drives. He’s been trying to warn people about the potential risk – with no luck.

For the purpose of this investigation, CBS news correspondent Armen Keteyian and Juntunen bought several used copier. At the time of purchase, they had no idea who had owned the machines previously. Once they pulled the hard drives out, they found thousands of pieces of sensitive information. One of the copiers had documents still on the copier glass, from the Buffalo, N.Y., Police Sex Crimes Division.

The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

But it wasn’t until hitting “print” on the fourth machine – from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.

It seems as though no one realizes how huge of a potential threat to security this is. A large majority of people who have used copy machines never knew that there IS a hard drive in them which keeps a copy of everything they’re doing. It’s almost as though this is being swept under the proverbial rug. Why isn’t anyone making more noise about this? Why aren’t there headlines everywhere shouting to people to warn them of this situation? There should be warning labels on every one of these machines, and pages in the instruction booklets telling consumers how they can permanently remove the data in the event the machine is sold or given back at the end of a leased period.

How many times have you used a device like this in a work environment to scan, fax or copy things of a sensitive nature? How often have you used a “public” machine (for instance, in a bank) to fax important personal information to a company… such as your insurance company? Do you have any idea where your data is now? I have a feeling that you don’t. And that, my friends, worries me.