MacBook Photo and CD Warning!

Ah yes, the new plastic wonder in all its glory. Boy, do I love this thing. You don’t even have to open it up to appreciate the glory of it all.

But as I was sorting through the four different hard drives where I have the last six years of digital images stored, organizing them all for backing up yet again, I realized I didn’t have any 2000-2002 photos. Those were all on CDs and 100MB Zip disks. I dug out the CDs, burned on a 3rd-party CD burner way back when using the old PowerMac 8600 running OS 9 something-something, or maybe even OS 8. You tell me.

Well, I couldn’t open the images. On some CDs, yes, on others, no. What happened when I tried was that the Finder hung up indefinitely, leaving me no option but to relaunch it. But everything was hunky-dory on the Zip disks: every single photo file opened just as nice as you please.

My little personal experiment, conducted unwittingly over several years, shows conclusively that CDs burned on your computer don’t last! With me the critical point seems to come at about three years old. Or four. Who knows. I can’t get you all the details, because it’s such a drag relaunching the Finder. But dang, those Zip disks are okay.

I expect some of you in the comments will set me straight on how one can avoid this trouble, but it seems to me that our civilization is in deep doo-doo with so many people relying on CDs burned at home.