What brand of archival DVDs best for Macs?

Macs burn everykind of disk dude. Btw I suggest to use well known and reliable brands such as Verbatim, Sony, TDK etc. I personally use Verbatim and never lost a bit in years.

8thMan said:

I plan to digitize some old analog videos to DVD through iMovie + iDVD, but I've read (on Amazon) that some archival DVDs do not work on Macs. Is this true? If so, has anyone had any success burning to archival DVDs? What brand/type? Thanks.

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To add to eldino's point, it is not the Mac that should concern you. A much more important consideration is the drive in the Mac and how it handles your brand of DVD-R/RW. This is a much more delicate medium than CD-R/RW. You need to do some research to determine which is the best brand and model of blank DVD for the drive used to burn them and the drive(s) where they will be used. Start testing with top-quality name brand media. You may progressively try less expensive media until you find media that is unreliable in your workflow. After you settle on reliable media, then you still need to be concerned and handling your burned DVDs. Avoid exposing them to light when not in use. They may fade over time, leaving you with a coaster.

Could the issue be not with the discs themselves but with the disc format? When you burn a data disc they can be a Windows format, a Mac format, a hybrid format, etc.

I don't know much about this so someone else will have to chip in or you'll have to do a bit of Google-ing to see if this is the issue.

eldino said:

Macs burn everykind of disk dude. Btw I suggest to use well known and reliable brands such as Verbatim, Sony, TDK etc. I personally use Verbatim and never lost a bit in years.

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I wonder about this as well.

About 8 years ago I embarked on a major project, the scanning of film negatives dating as far back as the 1970's.

The process was simple, scan the negatives and burn the TIFF files to CD. You can imagine the time involved in such an endeavor. Fast forward to last November. All the CD's were burned on the same burner, a Hewlett Packard external unit.

I decided it was time to bring all those image files into one library, and I decided to use iPhoto. For the most part it went well, however I was concerned because a lot of the burned CD's could not be mounted in the iMac drive. The disks looked excellent, and why not, once they were burned they were placed in protective sleeves only to be brought out once to build a library.

I continued to import all the disks that worked, setting aside the ones that did not read. I acquired another external HP DVD/CD Burner and hooked it to the iMac via USB and began to play with the previously unreadable disks. There were 17 in total. Well 14 of the 17 were mountable and readable in the HP external drive. We could never get the other three to read, so we broke out the negatives and just rescanned them.

I guess the lesson here is to consider the disk brand/quality as well as the device they were burned on. From here on out we intend on creating any archival DVD's on the external HP burner. I figure this is one way to avoid any hassles due to changing hardware. When we get a new computer, we will have the drive that created the archives.

There's no question that archive-quality DVDs are going to give you better results than cheap media, while not necessarily costing you much more. I only use Verbatim Datalifeplus CDs and DVDs (not to be confused with Verbatim Datalife, which uses almost the same packaging). I've never ONCE had a bad burn with one of their disks, and I burn lots of CDs and DVDs.

The other day I was with a client and had to burn a CD for them on my Macbook. They handed me a cheap CD (Maxell or Memorex, I forget) and the burn failed. Got another one of the spindle and it failed too. Grabbed a Datalifeplus disc from my CD case and it worked on the first try.

Verbatim and Taiyo-Yuden are the standards in the DVD dub business.

maxell is another well-used, solid brand.
i've seen some folks used 'gold' dvds which supposedly last longer, but I don't know anything about them beyond that.

The "Gold" disks mentioned above are from Delkin. Regardless of weather or not you use the CD, or DVD flavor, they both utilize 24k gold. They are not cheap, but depending on your assigned value to the media being placed on them - they may, or may not be something you're interested in. I have personally used both their CD & DVD Archival Disks with great success; however, I'm not paying out of pocket for them either.

We've used them for everything, from backing up software CD & DVD titles, to burning our news broadcasts and image library for redundant, off-site storage. In the five years that we've been using them we have never had a problem. (knock on wood.) And, yes we have had to go back a couple of times in the past three years to use them.

100pk CD spindle
https://www.nppa.org/assets/applica...te=Ecommerce/ProductDisplay.cfm&ProductID=648

100pk DVD spindle
https://www.nppa.org/assets/applica...te=Ecommerce/ProductDisplay.cfm&ProductID=647

Delkin does offer smaller packaged deals, if you don't want to shell out the cost of purchasing them 100 disks at a time.

HTH's, but again - they're pricey.

Art

Another vote for Verbatim

I went through a stack of Maxell DVDs with over 25% failure rate before I switched exclusively to Verbatim. (Live and learn!)

In the two years since the switch to Verbatim, I have had 0 failures!

8thMan said:

I plan to digitize some old analog videos to DVD through iMovie + iDVD, but I've read (on Amazon) that some archival DVDs do not work on Macs. Is this true? If so, has anyone had any success burning to archival DVDs? What brand/type? Thanks.

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If you care about the data you will not depend on the quality of the meadia. An archival plan based on simply depending on quality media will not work. What you do if you really want the data to last to to assumethe media will fail because it will.

There is a rule of thumb for archives: You data needs to be on (at least) three diferent media and located in (at least) two different geographical locations. I would add to the above that yur data must be stored on (at least) tow different kinds of media.

Once you have the above you are not done. All media has a finite life. Let's assume 10 years on average before a disc fails in storage. But this means "on average" they will all not fail on the same date. Some discs will fail quickly and some might last 30 years. Statistically the more discs you have the higher chance that one of them will fail quickly. So you have to have a plan to periodically re-copy your media. If you keep three sets the chances of the same discs fails is remote. Because of the requirement to re-copy data I would not use DVDs as my storage media. I don't want to deal with 100 discs. Hard drives are now 20 cents per gigabyt and are competitive with blank DVD, mayb even less costly than the better blank DVDs. Buy a stack of 500Gb drives if you have a large archive.

You need to think about the statistics of "media lifetime". For example a "100 year disk" means that on average the disk will last 100 years. Sounds good, but if you wait 100 years and test you should find something like 50% of them have failed. If is like saying that the average hieght of women is 5-3. It means a lot of them are a little shorter and a little of them are a lot shorter. You have to plan for this

I don't recommend Bestbuy's Dynex dual layer DVDs.

Unless of course you like coasters.
I'm 0 for 3 so far.