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Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

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Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#131

Post by bluGill »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #125

Print media is often considered 'more permanent' that other digital storage media. But consider: every courthouse I ever visited had records 'back to the fire', the time the records room burned. Every one. Considering the flammability of paper multiplied by the probability of a fire annually gives you the means to come up with a mean-time-between-failure for paper records. And I'd guess it isn't very long - maybe 50…

Unless you have ideal storage conditions, print media won't last more than a few hundred years - and that is with acid free paper, acid treated paper won't last that long.

There is a reason ancient documents are found in Egypt "all the time" and almost no place else in the world: Egypt is an ideal climate to store paper. The rest of the world paper will decay in a few hundred years. (of course modern technology can create better conditions - if we choose to keep it running)

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#132

Post by bluGill »

yosito wrote: post #14
squarefoot wrote: post #6

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.

My hardrives are in a ZFS z2 array: I have already survived one total failure with no dat loss. I not protected against fire, but overall my data is safer than ever.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#133

Post by grafelic »

The article linked to technical bulletin 27 "Remedies for Deteriorated or Damaged Modern Information Carriers" which linked to following publication:

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2016/pch/C...

which contains remedy descriptions for damaged optical dics.

I have had some success removing surface scratches with very fine sandpaper and buffering wheel on a drill press.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#134

Post by ja27 »

darkwater wrote: post #29

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've oddly noticed zero issues reading CD-R's going back to 1999 as recently as last year. I could certainly have some unnoticed bitrot but compressed archives have restored fine.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#135

Post by ridgered4 »

Test0129 wrote: post #32

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…

Is there a reason you didn't go with M-disc?

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#136

Post by GnarfGnarf »

I can still read my backup CDs from 1998. I recently invested in M-disk DVDs and a compatible burner. Not cheap ($10/disk), I only use one every other month, I use the regular DVDs the rest of the time.

BTW I calculate and write MD5 checksums on the backup DVDs, so each file can be validated years from now.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#137

Post by ruffrey »

darkwater wrote: post #67
grishka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I concur, there is no "fire and forget" solution comparable to what a physical medium gives you. And I could have probably avoided the CD-RW corruption by dumping the whole image on a new CD / DVD / USB storage every now and then. I also have some external magnetic HDD that is now already ~10 years old, stored in the same conditions as the aforementioned CD, let see how it fares in 2032 :)

There are several models of DVD called “M-DISC” which have gold plating. They are advertised as lasting hundreds of years.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#138

Post by thrdbndndn »

From my experience, commercial CD/DVD seem to have way higher quality and longevity than your personal CD-R/W etc.

I've purchased lots of 80s second-hand CDs that often have awful case conditions and they all read totally fine (as in, the CRC32 checks out with online database).

Is there a reason for that? Do they simply use better material or they have better tech to write them?

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#139

Post by ridgered4 »

nordsieck wrote: post #95
jl6 wrote: post #9

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,…

> 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, and then it won’t be long before the drives become a greater limit to longevity than the media. IMO, the #1 use case for optical drives is probably playing music in the car. For anything old enough that it doesn't have an aux port, it's the best solution. * Tape adapter…

My 2012 car supports reading mp3s off a CD which greatly improved the utility for me.

I kind of prefer it over the AUX jack since I hate messing with a touchscreen phone while driving. The radio has actual buttons and since it only does one thing it doesn't need to be messed with much to begin with.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#140

Post by anthk »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #64
sergers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my case it was early MMA fights, I was obssessed with martial arts in general, and up to 2007 I literally had a 500+ collection of burned CDs and DVDs, with every single fight from every major promotion in the world, catalogued by date, fighter's involved, styles, results etc. Until someday I realized that I probably would never rewatch any of those fights, I would simply watch the new ones that are happening ever…

In my case I've got the complete collection from The Twilight Zone and Star Trek:TNG among the movies. Everything else it's just a rehash from these scripts.
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