51–60 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
The accelerated tests actually performed on them may (or may not) be reflective of longevity in the long time.
Are they "tougher" than other disks? Yes.
Will they last 1000 (or only 100) years? We will see.
I used to be concerned about optical media longevity. I bought Taiyo-Yuden discs. I checked their integrity. I stored them carefully. But the format became obsolete (for me) long before the media degraded. Recordable discs are just too small for the backup use case I had. Optical drives are still available of course, but they are now rarely standard with a new PC or laptop, and soon will become specialist components,…
I was a fan of the matte white top printable taiyo udens. Back in my sharing early days, I probably had like 1000+ dvds of anime, movies, hk film, games etc easily. I had so much media that I didn't have time to watch it all, let alone watch it again in the future (there are some gems that I actually went out and purchased retail copies). Plus alot of the shit would get released at higher quality making my archive ob…
Now, I'm still doing much of the same, but this time downloading movies, TV series, documentaries etc. via Snahp to my archive on an external HDD.
The other day I suddenly had a realisation: Why on earth am I downloading 1080p films to watch sometime in the future when I'm probably going to buy a 4K UHD TV in six months or so from now?
So I need to stop doing so much of this digital hoarding. In the end it's not good for me, and I could instead download whatever I want to watch when I'm actually GOING to watch it.
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.
Like also for floppy disks, the older CDs had typically a higher manufacturing quality than the more recent. 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…
After quite a bit of research into this about a year back I decided to archive everything on archive-grade CD-Rs. 20-50 years is more than enough and realistically in the correct climate (a safe or something that humidity would have trouble getting into along with dessicants, etc) could last much longer. I evaluated magnetic tape, HDDs, and a few other options are CD-Rs are as good as magnetic tape (in longevity) and…
Taiyo Yuden at least used to be white labeled sometimes, so you'd just look up online what white-label media at Best Buy or CompUSA at the time was Taiyo Yuden.
I haven't burned a disc in probably close to a decade at this point though. SpiderOak is my backup.
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.
You can ask the Floppy King about that - near the end of 3.5" floppy manufacturing they saw astronomical rates of failure, 30-50%.
Similarly the quality of CD-Rs definitely took a nose-dive. I'm fairly certain the tail end of "20+ year" CD-R/DVD-R discs won't last as long as claimed but YMMV.
All 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…
Totally 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hit or miss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
The problem with cloud storage is that it's a needy thing. You have to pay for it in periodic payments the whole time it exists. And it's also controlled by someone else. I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hi…