Penny-Wise...?
The company I work for uses CD-Rs as a portable drive. In that they format the disk so it can be written to and "erased" by a CD Burner (I guess you understood what I meant). They have been using the same disks for several years with yearly changes being put on the disk and then the disk being filed until the next year. Lately there have been some strange things happening where all the data on the disk is lost. Someone thought that maybe using the disks are rewriteables is the problem. My question is, can a CD-R be used as a CD-RW? Or once a document is saved to the disk is it actually there for ever? Even if the directory shows it has been deleted? Thanks in advance for your assistance, John.
CD-R's can't really be erased; but they can be recorded without "closing" the disc, which allows for later recording/burning sessions to make changes to the disc. One such possible change is to hide the old data (such as by altering the disc's table of contents). The data is actually still there, but the OS is fooled into thinking it's not.
Here's an easy way to see the effect of this: When you truly erase a disk, the old files disappear and the full capacity of the disk returns. When you pseudo-erase a disk, the old files disappear, but the disk's capacity does not increase (because the old data is really still there).
It sounds like your company is doing this pseudo-erasure on the old disks. I have to ask: With new disks only $0.25 or so, why on earth is your company trying to reuse old ones? If they need to save the old data, then the thing to do would be to burn all the old data and each year's new data to a new, fresh disk; and then "close" the CD with the burning software. That way, (1) the disk will never be more than a year old, and all the problems of disk longevity go away; and (2) the CD will be able to be read in any normal PC with a CD. (In contrast, unclosed CDs can only be read in CDRs with burning software active.)
I'm all for frugality, but risking data to save $0.25 a year seems a bit over the top to me. <g>
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