Pogue’s terrified that his homemade DVDs are Going, Going, Gone?
Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.)Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old!
Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable.
Tried them on a MacBook that I’d been sent to review. Incredibly, mercifully, they all came through fine. I was able to rescue all those original iMovie projects and copy them onto new, bigger, cheaper hard drives.
But holy cow—how many thousands of people are backing up onto DVD, thinking that they’ll be set for at least a decade or two?
I know, of course, that home-burned DVD’s, which rely on organic dye that deteriorates with time, are nowhere near as long-lived as commercially pressed discs. But man. Four years? Scared the bejeezus out of me.
I’ve been told by experts that the gold DVD blanks can indeed last 100 years. Guess I’ll be trying that next!