11–20 of 204 posts
I thought all libraries using optical discs technology migrated to M-DISCs already.
Do we actually know that M-DISCs are much better than ordinary discs regarding longevity? I wasn't really convinced by the wikipedia page
I still have my first recorded CD from 94 early 95 with a beta version of windows 95 plus some other utilities from the time, it still reads fine.
This is shown in the table from the parent article, where there are 3 rows for CD-R, the best, which were specified as suitable for archival purposes, but Kodak and the few other manufacturers of such CD-R have stopped soon their production, the second best, which were the original CD-R with phthalocyanine dye and then the other CD-R, whose expected lifetime is only half, with cheaper dyes, which were introduced on the market later.
Also, as expected, the table shows that the higher the information density is, the lower the expected lifetime is, when similar materials are used.
I've stopped using burned CDs and DVDs like 15 years ago, long before they were considered obsolete, after losing a huge amount of data, including multiple backups of projects. All of them were kept in their own case on a wall CD/DVD holder, no weights, no humidity, no excessive heat or any sun exposition. After only about 5 years like 30% of them were unreadable at all and others developed errors, so as soon as I re…
Oh how many doubts I have... All of my CR-RWs from a decade or two ago are all unreadable. All CD-Rs from the same dates read fine. Even at the time it was known that RWs lose the data quickly. Strange to see this "20-50 years" here in this table row.
More recently, I looked into re-adding optical disks (this time, M-Disc at BD capacities) as one backup medium for current home servers, but the tech manufacturers just seemed even more user-hostile and Linux-hostile than they used to be. Maybe it's due to the intersection with piracy, maybe it's due to market forces of consumers who aren't very savvy about their own interests, but whatever the reason, it didn't look like an attractive option.
(Low-level burning software for optical drives was always crazy, and required some tricky alchemy by saintly open source programmers, as well as a user tolerance for burning the occasional "coaster" (failed burn). I layered my own, simpler, software atop their critical work. But I'm not interested in reinvesting in a category of media that in some ways seems to be getting worse, or even customer-hostile, at the same time that it's fallen out of popularity. If someone has better information, about how some corner of this is rock-solid, non-hostile, and otherwise viable, then I'd be happy to reconsider.)
I've stopped using burned CDs and DVDs like 15 years ago, long before they were considered obsolete, after losing a huge amount of data, including multiple backups of projects. All of them were kept in their own case on a wall CD/DVD holder, no weights, no humidity, no excessive heat or any sun exposition. After only about 5 years like 30% of them were unreadable at all and others developed errors, so as soon as I re…
"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.
CDs/DVDs/... feel very much more like a "long-term" storage solution, even when it isn't. Maybe it's because you can put them in shelves and forget about them, much like books?
I still have my first recorded CD from 94 early 95 with a beta version of windows 95 plus some other utilities from the time, it still reads fine.
> BD-R (non-dye, gold metal layer) 10 to 20 years
> BD-RE (erasable Blu-ray) 20 to 50 years
I find hard to believe that info. Seems to be sustained by a single study. That would mean that bluray (specially the BR-R format) is a pretty flawed technology.
For example if you wanted to store data in a time capsule for like 100 or 200 and you where ganrateed the people on the other side had a reader capable of reading whatever media, and whatever format you chose.