Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

[Antonio Carlini]

> The necessity of CRC's depend on what you plan on doing with the data.
> If it is just going to be sitting in a nice, safe box, then 
> it doesn't 
> matter.

True. Unless you've gone to the trouble of archiving the
stuff because you would like it to be reliably retrievable
at some point in the future.

If reliable retrieval in the future is of no concern,
then I propose a format conisting of an empty file.
At least you'll be certain of what you get :-)

Seriously, after all the discussion of bit-rot on
various media, how can you consider some sort of
checksum to be anything other than essential?

Some sort of error-correcting code might be an
even better idea.

Antonio

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Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org