Petr Baum via luv-main wrote:

Hi,

I have got a big box of about 25 years old CD ROM disks with scanned B/W 70-100 years old photo negatives. I was using copies from HDD for many years but failure of my server resulted in loss of significant part of files. I plan to make another set of copies from original CDs.

Some of these CDs had reading problems when new and it is unlikely that readability improved over time. I may use Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier and/or Ddrescue but as a first step I would like to get the best external CD ROM drive available for linux.

Petr; It seems to me this is about digital archiving rather than a specifically linux issie so I am; also replying on luv-talk. 1/- There seems to be some spread of opinion on the subject of archival read life of material recorded on CD/DVD's ;     Issues to do with the orignal recording medium, storage environment and even,    how to define "archival read life"  see https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cds-truth-cddvd-longevity-mold-rot/        https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/ via google search string "read life of cd/dvd" 2/ Perhaps you can draw some conclusions from your own experience,     by simply assembling statistics on the  the readability of you CD's and the current quality of the phptographs ! 3/ When I was investigating this issue I came to the conclusion that "M-Disk"s were the best current solution;    this involves (a) buying an M-disk capable DVD R/W (most Blue-Ray drives) (b) a supply of M-Disks (25- 100)GB regards Rohan McLeod