When CD was new, there was research that said it would last 1-5 years
Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#42Totally anecdotal but just a month ago I opened a box from my last moving (ended 4 years ago...) and I found a CD-RW labeled "Backup 2001", which survived 5-6 relocations, even an international one. Well, I put it into an USB DVD player I have aaaand, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and nothing shows up in Nautilus. Looking at dmesg I see a few I/O errors on the device. Then, I try ddrescue [1], start e…
I recently sampled a CD-R from late 90s, mostly videos. I couldn't open a few files. Storage: inside home, temperature range from maybe 18 at night to 35 max. I'll give a try to ddrescue.
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#43Not sure about the claims that blue ray's longevity may be less than cds and dvds. The technology greatly improved in the past decade (the article was written in 2010) and multiple sources saying the opposite. M-DISC brds seem to be capable of long term archiving.
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#44> BD-R (dye or non-dye, single layer or dual layer) 5 to 10 years > 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.
That means first games for PS4 are already damaged.
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#45Totally anecdotal but just a month ago I opened a box from my last moving (ended 4 years ago...) and I found a CD-RW labeled "Backup 2001", which survived 5-6 relocations, even an international one. Well, I put it into an USB DVD player I have aaaand, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and nothing shows up in Nautilus. Looking at dmesg I see a few I/O errors on the device. Then, I try ddrescue [1], start e…
I recently sampled a CD-R from late 90s, mostly videos. I couldn't open a few files. Storage: inside home, temperature range from maybe 18 at night to 35 max. I'll give a try to ddrescue.
Same storage conditions here, probably never over 30C though, but I really never cared for its storage either. Give a try to ddrescue, it's pretty straightforward to use, I just ran it with defaults and it worked pretty well, but it has a ton of parameters if you want.
Now I have stored the whole disk image in the cloud (BackBlaze), let see in 2043 if I can still access it!
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#46At the end of the day for any serious archiving tape should be used, no?
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#47At the end of the day for any serious archiving tape should be used, no?
Tape decays as well, and probably at a faster rate than optical.
For any serious archiving i would consider M-disc Blu-Ray
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#48Not sure about the claims that blue ray's longevity may be less than cds and dvds. The technology greatly improved in the past decade (the article was written in 2010) and multiple sources saying the opposite. M-DISC brds seem to be capable of long term archiving.
There's a (not very scientific) test here : http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#49What would one use as a media for long-long-term storage, taking only into account the resisiliance of the ability to read the data from it? 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.
Paper is a good one but the media is low-density and fragile. Although pre-industrial forms of paper (e.g. cotton paper, or papyrus) might have more long-term resistance than modern wood paper. Fired clay tablets are much more resistant, but lower density (because clay), unless you use a dedicated press maybe (most of the ancient Near East clay tablets were actually fired fortuitously e.g. by a building burning down,…
> If your focus is on longevity above all else, then you can’t beat stone.
Stone can degrade as well. Basalt can absorb CO2 [1], marble is vulnerable to acids [2], and generally acid rain is a huge problem for historic buildings [3], as is bird poop [4].
Probably the only material impervious to damage is diamonds.
[1] https://www.geo.uni-hamburg.de/geologie/ueber-das-institut/n...
[2] http://intlstoneworks.com/blog/2018/03/13/substances-that-ac...
[3] https://www.lwl.org/pressemitteilungen/nr_mitteilung.php?url...
[4] https://www.mannheim.de/de/nachrichten/taubenschmutz-und-den...
Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
#50All of the CDs in my old collection are fine, but I’ve had major problems with my DVD collection. I haven’t spent any time trying to figure it out, but it looks like some kind of unusual mold that I’ve never seen or some kind of deterioration of the substrate occurred inside some of the discs and they became completely unplayable. Attempts at cleaning completely failed to solve the problem. Is there really a major di…
As explained in the article DVDs are made by sandwiching the dye and reflective layers between two polycarbonate layers, which are then glued together. The adhesive used is sometimes prone to failure, causing delamination of the disc (this can happen with pressed DVDs as well, I have a few Xbox 360 games that became unreadable due to moisture getting between the layers). CDs do not suffer from this issue as the data layer is placed directly under the label, with no need for an intermediate polycarbonate layer.