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Backup your backups

Ever notice how your oldest CD – mine’s a copy of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing – is starting to skip, no matter how well you may have taken care of it over the years? You check it over for scratches and smudges, find nothing, a

Ever notice how your oldest CD – mine’s a copy of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing – is starting to skip, no matter how well you may have taken care of it over the years? You check it over for scratches and smudges, find nothing, and still it won’t play?

Welcome to the wonderful world of CD-rot, the dirty little secret that the manufacturers don’t want you to know about. Back when they were introduced in the 1980s, CD’s were heralded as indestructible – no more worn out grooves on records, no more faded or broken magnetic tape in your cassettes. The CD was supposed to be the last format you would ever buy, with technology that was supposed to last for a hundred years if you took care of it.

It turns out that some of your CDs that can no longer play properly were simply manufactured poorly, allowing air to oxidize the thin aluminum layer that is sandwiched between a couple layers of lacquer. If you look closely on some disks you can actually see evidence of this in the form of black spots and tiny holes that let the light through.

Most manufacturers attribute CD-rot to the actions of the disk’s owner. If you scratch the protective layer by not putting a disk away properly by stacking them, then air will get in and oxidize the disk.

Damage can also occur if you are too aggressive when removing disks from their protective cases – if you bend them you can damage the glue that holds the wafer together, once again letting air in.

Where it gets confusing is the fact that most people tend to protect the readable side of the disk rather than the label side. In fact, the lacquer is always thicker on the bottom. Most of the wear and tear occurs on the label side where the lacquer is more fragile.

It’s not only CDs you need to worry about, either. The same basic flaws that allow your CDs to rot will also rot your CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, and other laser media. DVDs are slightly tougher because the layers are encased in stronger plastic, but it’s all relative.

Rewriteable CD and DVD disks also require special care and should not be used for long-term storage because they have a heat sensitive layer that decays faster than layers in disks that only let you write to them once.

The lack of certainty in storage has some government institutions and businesses worried about the safety of their records, as entire archives of information have been scanned and stored on disks over the past decade. They want to know exactly how long the disks will last and if they need to start making back-up copies of their back-ups.

A lot of people are probably wondering the same thing. These days it’s relatively easy for people to make backup copies of their CDs on their home computers, and many people are skipping CDs altogether in favour of portable digital formats like MP3s.

It’s still illegal to copy DVD movies, even for back-up purposes. A Norwegian teenager by the name of Jon Lech Johannsen came up with a program that breaks the DVD encryption code, but he has since been shut down by his government. His program, DeCSS, is still widely available on the Web but it’s illegal to use.

According to a recent Associated Press article that revealed the inherent flaws in different disks, there are steps that you can take to protect your CD collection, or at least slow down the aging process.

The first is to only handle disks using the outer edge or centre hole, but take care not to bend them when you pop them out of the case.

You should only use a felt-tip permanent marker on the label side of the CD – anything harder can scratch through the protective layer, speeding up the rot.

You should keep your disks clean by wiping them with a piece of cotton fabric from the centre to the edge, and put your disks away immediately after using them.

It’s also recommended that you store your discs upright like books, preferably in a cool, dry and dark place. CD carousels that can store hundreds of your disks are also a good idea, although they will be exposed to more heat.

That’s about all you can do. Until manufacturers come up with something more rugged, your best shot at preserving your music, digital photographs and data is to treat your disks as they really are – fragile, temporary, and temperamental things.

The manufacturers may deny it, but now you know better.

Trouble with iTunes?

A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down for Mac users who have been thrilled with the new Apple iTunes 4.5.

At face value it looks great. The new site features free song downloads, more graphics, CD case covers, and a service that lets you put your playlist online for people to rate – a nice way to find out about new bands from people with similar tastes. People liked the new version of iTunes so much that they helped set a new record of 3.3 million song downloads in a week.

Strip away the candy-coating, however, and you’ll find a few flaws. For example, the new iTunes service reduces the number of times by half that you can burn a purchased song to compact disks. Although this isn’t such a big deal because you can still copy the song from disk to disk – and most people never fully used the old 10 burn limit anyway – it suggests that Apple and its partners in the music industry don’t believe iTunes clients are trustworthy – even though they purchased the music instead of downloading it illegally.

It also offers the opportunity for Apple to charge people twice for the same song, should you exceed the burn limit. Most people would refuse and get the song another way, but keep in mind that many iTunes users are kids. Kids who are using their parents’ credit cards, who don’t know the real value of a dollar, and have no moral dilemma over downloading the same song twice to make mixed CDs for all of their friends.

People who aren’t technically inclined, who use iTunes to burn their CDs because it’s the easiest way, could also get hit twice.

Compounding the problem is the fact that different players are more and more incompatible with three different music formats out there – Apple’s AAC, Microsoft’s WAV and Sony’s Atrac. All of the different music download services are using these different formats, and none of these sites are completely comprehensive.

The upshot is that even if you download a song on iTunes, it won’t work with your Sony MiniDisc player, or another media player that uses WAV. As a result you may have to download that song twice after all.

The moral of the story? It seems that you can’t really own the songs you download these days, you can only rent.