Archiving Solution with Optical Disc

Abstract

Ever since the dawn of human being, variety of media such as stone, parchment, bamboo, woods, paper, magneto, optical and electric has been used for recording information. Among those, the optical discs initially started from audio CD in early 1980s, has 12 cm diameter, still playing prominent roles for long term with its stable format, despite the continued evolution of electronic products. The recordable optical discs has also been used for data storage and data distribution for more than 20 years showing its continued strong demand over 10 billion discs every year. Its applications are broadly ranged such as audio, video, PC and digital information.Though optical discs have less capacity and slower transfer rate than hard disk drives and magnetic tape, they have great deal of potential for application of long term archiving.This report discusses the use of optical discs as archiving media and trends in its standardization towards it. As an example, this paper also examines the recovery of discs damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake.