DVD Archive

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I notice that one can now buy DVD-R disks as low as $0.58.  This beats 
CD-Rs at $0.18 which is the best price that I have paid, but not recently.

DVDs are better for me in that one will hold a whole night's worth of data 
for a telescope, so it makes for easier archiving.  At the moment I am 
writing last night's data to CDs and there are 8 to write.  So there is not 
much one can do between putting disks in the slot and labels on the 
finished ones.  (I generally do e-mail as I am doing now) So the write 
process takes a couple of hours during which time there is little else that 
I can do.

With a DVD I could just start the write process after taking a night's 
data.  With a good data examination program (I am working on it) I could 
then just start running and write everything to DVD.  Then the analysis 
program could sort out what is good.  OK, I stll believe in doing some 
looking at the data as it goes by, but in the future this should be more 
and more automated.

Does any one have experience with writing data to DVDs?

Under Windows?
Under Linux?
Is there something like xcdroast for DVDs?

How about the archival life of the DVD?  Does anyone know of archival testing?

I have a stock of 1000+ CDs, when they run out would seem to be about the 
right time (8 months from now?) to switch over to DVDs.

Tom Droege