Time sure flies.  One day you’re changing your child’s diaper and the next they’re going away to college.  My oldest daughter is gearing up for her eighteenth birthday and getting ready to move out of her mother’s house and into a dormitory.

Last week I spent hours rummaging through my cellar scavenging all the old movies from when my kids were babies.  The first purchase their mother and I made was an 8mm video camera and every minute of childhood sits on that tape.  Well, I found the box with videotapes and the Sony HandyCam, dusted it off, and brought it upstairs.

Most of the tapes played with a bit of static; yet others didn’t play at all.  Luckily most of the tapes that failed were labeled “Jeromy” or “cats.”  I say ‘lucky’ because had the tapes of me worked, I most likely would have broken the camera.  No matter, I was able to duplicate enough footage of my daughter to mortify her in front of family and friends.

While scouring boxes I put my hand on sleeves of CD’s and DVD’s we had made over the years.  Thinking there were some videos of my daughters, I schlepped those to my computer.  Sure enough I found about half of the DVD’s labeled as movies worked and the others didn’t.  I realized the half that didn’t were on a specific type of DVD popular around twelve years ago.

With a bit of research I discovered that magnetic media like cassette tapes, 8mm, and VHS have a shelf life.  I was disappointed to learn the average life of a tape product is ten years.  One person in the industry suggested transferring to digital as soon as five years after making the original.  I was surely saddened by that answer.

All this talk of failing media started me thinking about my DVD and CD collection.  Should I be worried about them also?  According to several experts on the subject, the average life expectancy of a burned CD or DVD (one made on a home computer) is around five years.  Apparently after that data may vanish without warning.

I’m going to date myself and admit to having floppy discs dating back twenty plus years.  Most of the files are papers I wrote in college so they’re not necessarily important, but why not find out?  I wasn’t too surprised to discover they degrade similarly to audio or video cassettes.  If handled properly floppy discs may last up to ten years.

Here’s something most of us are familiar with:  USB thumb drives.  I’ve had dozens of them fail at the shop and should probably have stock in Kingston.  Because the technology is relatively new, virtually no real-time observations have been made.  I did find that my thumb drive’s life expectancy is 100,000 ejections from the computer.

Mechanical hard drives, like those found in 99% of computers, have a life expectancy as well.  On occasion we’ll have a customer walk in with a drive from their first computer expecting data.  Even though the drive physically passes our tests, no data is present.  Unused drives typically start to degrade after around fifteen years.  Though data may be accessible, portions may be corrupt.

One manufacturer years ago claimed its media was good for life.  Unfortunately, most of the proprietary hardware used to read and write the media failed long before a lifetime so we’ll never know.  For the rest of us, knowing media is prone to failure it’s a good idea to be redundant.  Making backups of one-of-a-kind media is vitally important to prevent permanent loss.  Of my media that was good, everything has been backed up.

 (Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner.  You can text him directly at (978) 413-2840 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)