13 ms·

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

298 points by parasti 4y ago

kingkawn 4y ago
All my cdr’s from late 90s have failed
tiagobraw 4y ago
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.
- miked85 4y ago
  > the lifetime of recordable optical discs can range from a couple of years to more than 200 years You are still in that range then
- bzzzt 4y ago
  Do you test the data is identical? I've got a stack of old CD-R's containing mp3 files from 20 years ago and lots have unreadable files or worse: data that reads correctly but won't play without glitches. (corrupt mp3's can produce loud spikes that are very bad for your ears and/or audio equipment) Most are fine though.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  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 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.
  - em500 4y ago
    I think that optical disks is a lot like a Lemons market[1]. Buyers can't evaluate the quality (durability) of disks, so are not willing to pay high prices, which drives high quality suppliers out of the market, which causes buyers to offer even less, which drives even more quality suppliers out of the market, resulting in a death spiral. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- NL807 4y ago
  Yep, same. Incidentally these were on Kodak Golds, which arguably were the best CD-R media you could buy.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I thought all libraries using optical discs technology migrated to M-DISCs already.
- karencarits 4y ago
  Do we actually know that M-DISCs are much better than ordinary discs regarding longevity? I wasn't really convinced by the wikipedia page
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    For DVD (and the rare M-DISC CDR) yes. For BluRay there is nothing special about them.
    - mrfinn 4y ago
      Any references about the BluRay claim? Genuinely curious
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        Where can you get MDISC CDR?
    - em500 4y ago
      It's a bit more nuanced than that. Standard CD-R and DVD-R uses organic dyes for the recording layer, which are sensitive to light and humidity. M-DISC DVD-R used some proprietary inorganic layer, which was more durable in theory and in independent lab tests[1]. When BD-R was introduced, all discs used the same inorganic recording layer, including M-DISC BD-R. That, plus the lack of independent tests, plus the fact that the manufacturer Verbatim likes to muddy the waters between M-DISC DVD-R and BD-R, led some people to conclude that there is nothing special about M-DISC BD-R. However, after a few years, disc manufacturers started making BD-Rs using organic recording layers again with inferior durability[2]. Initially these were marked as "LTH" discs (with the original non-organic BD-Rs marked as "HTL"), but nowadays they mostly stopped marking them at all so you simply don't know what you buy. With M-DISC BD-R you'll likely get a HTL disc (but it's not garanteed, since they don't advertise it either). Additionally, there's more to durability than the recording layer (such as the material of the reflexive layer, and the overall build quality). And there is at least some anecdotal evidence that M-DISC BD-R are indeed more durable than the median BD-R[3,4]. The consensus among enthusiasts is that for BD-R, M-DISC and Panasonic HTL (Made in Japan) are very good. But they come with a big price premium (about $2 per disc vs $0.60 for some generic LTH disc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Durability_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Durability_claims [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable#Recording_mechanisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable#Record... [3] https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical-Disks.html https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical... [4] https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-revi...
squarefoot 4y ago
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 realized what was going on I backed up everything I could to hard drives in multiple copies, dumped them all and stopped using that media completely. Printed media last a lot more, but those CD/DVD R/RW to me are too unreliable to be used for anything beyond the occasional OS image install where USB boot isn't available.
- yosito 4y ago
  "Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    Sure - but with HDDs, you tend to just move all your stuff during each update cycle, because the new generation then tends to have a multiple of the capacity you've had before. 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?
    - cm2187 4y ago
      Plus your backup probably requires dozens of CDs and DVDs, and perhaps they then fit on a handful of 4TB drives, and perhaps now they fit on a single 20TB drive. For me, my storage needs increase more or less linearly, but storage capacity increases exponentially, making every cycle easier, involving less drives.
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    Like DNA or living organisms: digital data has to be kept "live" to truly be secure, replicating itself somewhat regularly. Attempts to store it statically are cost-prohibitive or fail at much higher rates than claimed. Worse if the technology is on a down-hill trend because manufacturers focusing on quality are the first to go out of business (higher expenses in a shrinking market). 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.
jl6 4y ago
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, and then it won’t be long before the drives become a greater limit to longevity than the media.
- sergers 4y ago
  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 obsolete (not always) One day I just chucked it all out.... Years of archiving, downloading, burning ripping. Was a waste of time and money in hindsight
  - pcf 4y ago
    Exactly the same here, except that I gave all those discs to friends. And I shudder to think how much time I wasted on all that archiving, when it ultimately wasn't worth it at all. 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.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      The problem is that many times, the "originals" (or official sources) become unavailable. There's a ton of old 80s/90s DOS games and 8-bit games that we still have now because of digital hoarders. If it weren't for them, they'd be lost because the original companies are long gone and most people just trash stuff. Now look at how much stuff regularly disappears from video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
least 4y ago
I'm quite surprised that CD-Rs have such a long potential longevity, though I suppose they are only a certain kind (that I almost certainly have never used when I was burning CD-Rs) that are designed to be more durable. It also kind of assumes that they're keeping them in an environment suitable for archival purposes, which does not exist in my home. Still, even the lesser CD-Rs are rated for much longer than what I would have pegged them at, given just how many CD-Rs I have that have already begun deteriorating. Perhaps the ones I was buying in giant spindles weren't advisable for archival use. I've many CD-R that I or friends have burned that have their layering flaking off, making them completely useless, and I'm sure that many people out there do as well, which is why I am skeptical of using them for anything important. In the end, for people's personal archives, they should certainly follow typical data integrity advice (i.e. the 3-2-1 rule) and also importantly, heavily curating what they choose to hold on to.
ahartmetz 4y ago
I should check my archive, but as of years ago, I have yet to find one bad disk. Anyone who cared could easily read up about it: writing at maximum speed produces marginal media. Writing at lower speed produces media with lower initial error rate and higher contrast, so much better longevity.
- xerox13ster 4y ago
  That was the kind of thing that kind of just seemed logical to me back then. I don't remember reading it anywhere, I think I just had the perception from VHS tape recording lengths.
dmitrygr 4y ago
> CD-RW (erasable CD) 20 to 50 years 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.
neilv 4y ago
When I was using dual-layer DVD+R blanks for off-site backups, the folk wisdom on blanks I heard from someone who burnt discs a lot was: to get a particular type and brand, and make sure the unit had been manufactured in Singapore. The country/factory of manufacture was indicated on the packaging, but the SKU and UPC didn't reflect that. 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.)
- bibaheu 4y ago
  Hi, I do the BD M-Dics at home, with Linux, with 0 problems. What problems did you get?
  - ruslan 4y ago
    I do backups of my home servers to BD-RE discs (BDXL 100GB) once a week from ZFS storage. The only problem is poor drive quality - for past five years I changed two dives (Asus branded, all different models). Seems they are not made for regular writes. So, the weak point is not the media itself but availability of dives which may just be missing in 20 years perspective.
mrfinn 4y ago
> 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.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  I haven’t seen a BD-R in my entire life. In fact, the only use of BR I’ve had is on the PlayStation. The technology came way too late.
- _int3_ 4y ago
  That means first games for PS4 are already damaged.
  - ace2358 4y ago
    I’m under the impression that ps4 discs are pressed. This article is about writable media. Writable media needs a dye or layer that can be ‘burnt’ Commercial disks don’t do this and instead are physically pressed. The dye material is the one that degrades over time. The pressed material doesn’t. Someone correct me if I’m wrong? Commercially pressed discs should last a very long time in comparison
    - brazzy 4y ago
      Basically correct, with a tiny caveat: there can be manufacturing defects where the reflective aluminum layer of pressed discs is not fully sealed and oxidizes over time.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  My educated guess would be something along these two threads: * Higher data density => tighter tolerance => same physical degradation is more catastrophic (DVD ~7x density of CD, BD-R ~20/10/5x DVD density = up to 140x CD density) * Produced later and therefore like all consumer goods, less regard for durability and more regard for absolute cost optimization
OptionX 4y ago
What 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.
- derwiki 4y ago
  Paper? We have family photos from the 1800s. Every bit of computer data I have from the 90 is gone.. except what I printed out.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  No matter the material, the storage conditions are crucial (sic). You want temperature, humidity, acidity, magnetic stability.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Granite. Edit: 100 - 200 years is probably 2 to 5 pandemics, some of which may be considerably worse than the last one; and plenty of time for fires, floods, storms, earthquakes, and/or war (civil or other). Granite has a track record. Some stainless steels might be OK too (not for much longer than 200 years, though). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra's_Needle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra's_Needle
- naikrovek 4y ago
  there is no "archive and forget" method. the library of congress uses contemporary storage media (hard drives), and migrates everything to newer storage media as the previous media becomes obsolete and replacement hardware for that media stops being manufactured. they have learned that stockpiling old reading hardware and software isn't sufficient to be able to read that media in the future. they move everything to new media manually and archivists and volunteers work continuously to bring data on hardware more than one generation old into the current generation as everything progresses. source: I read it in a detailed article about the LoC a couple of years ago and have forgotten where. :(
- 4y ago
rvieira 4y ago
When I was younger I started doing a lot of personal mixtapes as a hobby. A few years later, I moved to "mix cds". These are all made from my personal music collection (which is not backed up in optical media). Just saying, because CDs to me became just a transient media to, say, transport music to my car's stereo[1]. Because of this I never really bothered about longevity, they are just digital cassettes. [1] - Yes, I could replace my car CD player with something else, but now it's a nostalgia thing :)
ricardobeat 4y ago
That longevity table is under archival conditions (climate controlled). The vast majority of CD-Rs I had, regardless of brand, were completely gone after 10 years of storage in an enclosed textile bag. CD-RW would barely last 2-3 years.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Brand / media quality also matters a lot. I had some cheapo bulk CD-R whose top (reflective) layer started flaking after a few years (stored in their sleeves in a cardboard box in a dry cabinet). Stuff from reputable brands still look great, but I haven’t hard had a CD or DVD player in years if not decades at this point so it might be a cesspool of data loss for all I know.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    I used to buy those thick white labelled discs in a spindle, with a green reflective layer, and remember them being quite a bit more expensive. Can’t say I I’ve ever noticed a difference. The ones that are still playable (I hope so? Last checked maybe 5 years ago) are all industrial pressings.
darkwater 4y ago
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 extracting an image, leave it doing its work for a couple of hours and... magic! I have a perfectly mountable disk image! I got to live again some >20 years old memories, pictures of younger me with my friends. stupid things you would save as a late nerd teen with access to the Internet and a ton of emails in Outlook Express format (guilty!) that I could not open yet. I guess the format is probably not super-hard to parse (most of the content is plain text actually) but since I'm here, if you know of something already existing to convert it to mbox/maildir it would be cool! [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/
- xerox13ster 4y ago
  IIRC there was an import/conversion tool in Outlook 2003/2007.
- pmontra 4y ago
  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.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    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!
    - grishka 4y ago
      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 hit or miss.
Test0129 4y ago
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 will likely have readers well into the next century. But you have to be very careful. There are a few brands, in particular Taiyo Yuden that are the absolute best. CMC Pro is a related brand with the same technology/longevity (and easier to get). You will pay quadruple the cost per CD but its worth every penny. Avoid Memorex, JVC, etc. Basically any brand you can pick up at your local big box retailer.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > Taiyo Yuden I have not been able to buy these in the last few years. Also, when I was able to buy them, one had to be careful of counterfeits. Do you have a source for them?
  - Paianni 4y ago
    TY closed down their own disc manufacturing in 2015. Nowadays the CMC Pro line (with 'Powered by TY Technology' branding) is the closest you're going to get.
  - Test0129 4y ago
    I don't unfortunately. I use CMC Pro now which is highly regarded. They're "powered by TY technology" which I took to mean essentially white labeled TY, made in Taiwan, so I also assumed that CMC Pro was the actual producer of TY and now that TY is defunct CMC Pro took over selling stuff.
- cdr 4y ago
  I've always only bought Taiyo Yuden media since ~2000. Every CD-R and DVD-R I still have that I've tried is still readable. 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.
qwerty456127 4y ago
What about black CD-R disks?
sammalloy 4y ago
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 difference between DVD and CD manufacturing on a commercial level?
- spicyjpeg 4y ago
  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.
- cdr 4y ago
  There absolutely exist fungi that feeds on writable discs. Supposedly more common in tropical, humid areas.
fireflymetavrse 4y ago
Not 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.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  There's a (not very scientific) test here : http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...
_int3_ 4y ago
When CD was new, there was research that said it would last 1-5 years
chimineycricket 4y ago
At the end of the day for any serious archiving tape should be used, no?
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  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.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...
Kiro 4y ago
Never had a CD, DVD, SSD or HDD fail on me since the 90s. I'm almost starting to believe it's a myth.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  You are lucky... And/or just don't have a large sample size. Of the multiple hundred CDs I've burned back in the day, some failed in just a few months. Admittedly, it was in tropical (high-humidity, high-temperature) settings. As for HDDs, I lost about a quarter to a half, with the rest just being obsolete these days. I can definitely attest from personal experience that hard disks from the same series tend to fail at the same point (I had 3 WD blue HDDs in a single computer, as system, data, archival disks; the system one failed, so I moved the system to the data one, which failed a bit after; so I retired the third one; failures happened at about the same runtime according to SMART data).
hyperluz 4y ago
From what I know, M-DISCs will last longer, both on its DVD and BluRay variants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
stared 4y ago
It is ironic that in a few hundred years, people will be able to read ancient inscriptions in stone but not information from our age.
cm2187 4y ago
As long as price per capacity / storage density increases exponentially, isn't the best solution to transfer your storage to a newer medium over and over rather than taking a bet on a long term durability of a medium that we have no way to test (and a bet on the durability and forward compatibility of the device to read it). A single $500 20TB hard drive can contain 30,000 CD ROMS and 500 Blurays. Surely the economics are there.
IvanaDora 4y ago
6stringmerc 4y ago
“Handing someone a demo CD is like saying to them, Hey, you throw this away.” (Can’t recall the comedian, could be Dimitri Martin) It’s funny but burned CDs are a great handout for me. I can see through DistroKid that some people loaded them into iTunes and I got a small match but if money for it. Considering how cheap they are and “put in walk away repeat” the process is, I’m still happy to crank them out now and again. Plus! I have CD labels so they have personality and flair. Also they fit a 40-60 minute DJ set perfectly. Burn, pop in the car, party on the go baby.
- FroshKiller 4y ago
  It was Mitch Hedberg joking about getting a receipt for buying a doughnut.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Mitch Hedberg sounds right but I remember the joke as being about someone handing out paper advertisements on the street. The doughnut joke is a different one I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5pjBmNyrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5pjBmNyrE Also, for someone who died going on 2 decades ago, he's really got some staying power; I see kids discovering him and liking him to this day.
    - michaelgrafl 4y ago
      He made great jokes exclusively in a format that is usually reserved for bad jokes. He was a genius.
      - 6stringmerc 4y ago
        So much so it creeps into real life for me from time to time. About 10 years ago working in the Comerica building in downtown Dallas (you can see it in the skyline photos) I parked in a garage connected by hallways and tunnels to stay out of the heat or rain. There were two sets of escalators in this route. One set broke. Management put up a sign on a stand stating “Escalator out of service” and within about a week somebody opened Word or PowerPoint set it to landscape, printed out “Escalator temporarily stairs, sorry for the convenience” on a piece of paper and taped it over their sign. I’m sure I snapped a picture of it for the week or so it was left up.
RalfWausE 4y ago
After reviving a PC i had in the late 90s a couple of weeks ago i investigated this big box of CD-Rs standing besides it (in an unisolated attic in germany... so temperatures from about -5 °C to >35 °C), most of the CDs were burnt in a period from around '96 - 2005, many ... ehm... "off site backups" of games and other software but also personal files. What can i say... every CD i put in the drive worked flawlessly. I think it sometimes comes down to pure dumb luck.
- nekoashide 4y ago
  Quality can vary a lot, back in the late 90's you had certain brands and disc you would buy because of how much extra data you could write to them and also testing to see which disc performed better at higher writing speeds. It was a big deal to some folks back then and you likely bought the high quality ones.
mrjin 4y ago
Nah, my personal experience told me it's highly unlikely that long. Last time I checked my CD/DVD archives of around 10 years old. Checked some random 20% of all, 50% were completely unreadable, 30% readable but with noticeable losses, other seemed to be good but still I had no confidence of the integrity of the data. So I dumped all of them, even almost of full bucket of 50 unused DVD-Rs and quite a few DVD-RWs. Since then I did not really touched any optical drives at all. To my surprise, all my data left on HDDs or Flash drives were still good without any issues.
Sporktacular 4y ago
I wonder how M-Discs verifiably stack up in comparison.
mavhc 4y ago
DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) 10 to 20 years Why are they so bad compared to a disc that was burnt?
ephbit 4y ago
Since I saw ddrescue mentioned. I really found Dvdisaster helpful for rescuing DVDs. The only strange thing is, that somehow the version I can currently install from my package manager appears to be missing functionality that was once available when I installed it from Debian packages a few years ago.
smarx007 4y ago
Is anyone using M-disks and what's your experience so far? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://web.archive.org/web/20130422110903if_/http://www.mdisc.com:80/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod_04feb2010_a.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130422110903if_/http://www.mdi...
- GnarfGnarf 4y ago
  I just started using M-Discs last month. Bought a compatible burner, a Pioneer Blu-ray Disc (BDR-XD07B), CAD $170. I'm pleased to report that my burning software (ImgBurn) worked fine with the new Pioneer DVD drive. At $10 a pop, one is very prudent when choosing what to backup.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I have some M-DISC DVD's from ~15 years ago that still read fine. That said I still have a lot of cheap CDs from 20 years ago that still read fine as well. I've had a 25GB M-DISC BD-R kicking around on my desk without a sleeve or case for a while now to test durability. Sometimes I take it outside and leave it on my patio table for a few days to add some extra wear. I slide it around the desk, pick it up with normal greasy/dirty hands and handle it non-gently, flex it a bit, wash it off in the sink, and wipe it off with a cotton cloth. After four years of this abuse so far it still hasn't lost a single bit of data. I have noticed some of it takes a bit longer to get a good read so I'll probably lose data soon but this has been a hell of a lot of abuse so far.
- gruez 4y ago
  There's allegedly nothing different special about blu-ray M-DISCs >Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products. https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifetime-archival-millenniatam-disc-4x-bd-r-25gb/ https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifet...
- 4y ago
PaulHoule 4y ago
There was a panic circa 1980 about the longevity of color cinema film. Martin Scorsese pointed out the cultural loss but it was also a big dollar and cents loss because home video was on its way as a way to turn old movies into cash. People looked at quite a few different answers, including copying the movies and separating them into three films, one for each color, but the problem was simply solved when people discovered you can greatly extend the life of dyes by storing them in the freezer. You have to keep them out of light also. Conversely, high temperatures accelerate aging. I have a room in my house (an old farmhouse with uncontrolled humidity) which is very bright and somewhat intemperate (and also has a lot of indoor wildlife) and I’ve found prints made with fugitive dyes fade badly in six months — I didn’t get mad instead I use it for accelerated aging tests, I make two prints and store one in the dark and put the other in the wall. There is a book about this stuff at http://wilhelm-research.com/ http://wilhelm-research.com/
jjkaczor 4y ago
Once made a quick $5k, because a former client had started using CD-RW for their "enterprise" backups, 10-years later they had unreadable data and contacted me to see if I still had some source-code. Checked my stack of hard-drives, and... Yes... yes, I did have a working copy. That cemented it in my personal world - NAS with also HD's is the way to go.
- quesera 4y ago
  Both you and client got lucky there. Many contract agreements would not allow you to keep the data, and you'd be more likely to be sued than paid! But I agree that (maintained NAS >> removable media). :)
steveBK123 4y ago
Interesting that it looks like Blu-Rays in all forms have much shorter longevity than the preceding DVD and CD formats. Presumably due to tighter tolerances required to fit more data on the same platter size? I had switched to large format 50-100GB M-DISC BD-Rs a few years ago, but to be honest I'm often too lazy to bother with the process of burning discs for offline storage. I should probably upgrade my NAS/external HDD&SDD stack again. I would advise anyone going the NAS route to think carefully and read reviews on RAID devices. It's probably safer & easier to keep 2 copies in 2 formats on 2 different media in the end. I have had numerous consumer grade NAS RAID devices fail to the point I almost find it an additional failure mode rather than level of safety. Fragility of consumer grade RAID reminds me there's a reason our employers hire storage engineers!
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
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 years to a century.
- xattt 4y ago
  Sprinklers, as well as waterless fire suppression systems, are fairly recent inventions so their mettle has not been really tested on the time scale of document archiving.
- bluGill 4y ago
  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)
grafelic 4y ago
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/CH57-3-1-27-2005-eng.pdf 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.
GnarfGnarf 4y ago
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.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > MD5 checksums Better do recovery records, that way you would able to recover data and not only know it was corrupted. RAR recovery records, if storing in an archive is okay, or PAR.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
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?
- em500 4y ago
  Yes, the processes are very different. Commercial discs have physical pits pressed in the recording layer, while burned disks just use the laser to change the reflexity of the layer (which is some dye or phase changing alloy).
Roark66 4y ago
It would be really useful to have some storage media that can truly last 50 years. It is pretty disappointing that most of the media with useful capacity (dvd r etc) cap out at 20~50 years. I wouldn't trust the most commonly used storage now (usb thumb drives) with important data for even few years unless it was stored in triplicate. Personally I think the best method of long term data storage is spinning hard drives stored disconnected. I have a collection of them that goes back decades (with important data duplicated on multiple drives) including my first ever hard drive bought in mid 90s. Of my entire collection only one HDD broke down (actually one of newer 1tb usb3 drives bought few years ago - it started clicking few weeks ago). I can't vouch for the current spinning disc tech, but I distrust current SSD tech(SD cards and nvme included) more so my current data gets backed up to a set of spinning discs frequently.
1970-01-01 4y ago
I have binders full of cheap Staples CD-Rs from the early 2000s that literally flaked and peeled. I also have Sony CD-R discs in the exact same binders from the same time period. The Sony discs are fine.
- mjhagen 4y ago
  I have a couple of those flaked/peeled disks, those are gone beyond hope, right?
  - 1970-01-01 4y ago
    Undamaged tracks can still be read. Set the drive to the lowest spin speed and go for it.
at_a_remove 4y ago
I am surprised that we're still stuck at Blu-Ray levels of data storage on disc. I would have thought we would be up to a terabyte or so by now, but everything has stagnated. Tape remains expensive for the home data hoarder, and there is a point at which cloud storage becomes more expensive than tape.
- pgalvin 4y ago
  Sony and Panasonic are making 500GB optical disks as an LTO tape alternative for businesses (See Sony’s “Optical Disc Archive” - Panasonic has a different name for the same standard). However, these don’t really have a use for consumers. CDs had music, DVDs and Blu-rays had television and films, but there is unfortunately no compelling use case given home media is turning to streaming. Additionally, for many, cloud storage is replacing the need for local storage in spite of its drawbacks.
- Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
  I'd like Microsoft Project Silica to come to the market. Basically laser burning your data onto a cube of glass, like CD-Rs it is write once read many, but it can store so, so much more, and also once the bits are 'drilled' into glass...there is nothing to delaminate or stop reflecting. Is the glass scratched? No? Then a reading laser can see the bit state.
everdrive 4y ago
Does anyone have longevity information on commercially-pressed CDs and DVDs? I know that from my own experience they last longer, but not forever. When they were new, one of CD's major selling points was their longevity. This seems have been wildly over-estimated, however.
j_not_j 4y ago
Beware of silent corruption in your disk arrays. https://www.nsc.liu.se/lcsc2007/presentations/LCSC_2007-kelemen.pdf https://www.nsc.liu.se/lcsc2007/presentations/LCSC_2007-kele... Disks didn't always write a block in the correct place. Things are better now, but still not perfect. I would recommend that you read all your data all the time; this ensures RAID-1 or ZFS will correct the silent bitrot. Hopefully. A megabyte or two per second read rate is all you need. See the pdf for more. There is a git archive at https://gitlab.com/fsprobe https://gitlab.com/fsprobe for a reader utility.
astrostl 4y ago
"DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) 10 to 20 years" This is literally unbelievable to me. I have yet to encounter or hear about a single instance of a commercial disc failure, and that goes all the way back to double-sided DVDs in the old paper cases with a clip.
babypuncher 4y ago
Recordable media is a crapshoot. Some discs are great, others are terrible. I wouldn't trust CD/DVD-R for long term media storage. These discs can also be harder on your optical drive. I've seen lots of Sega Dreamcast and Xbox consoles with prematurely worn out lasers because the owners mostly played burned games. Pressed media has held up pretty well in my collection. I have CDs from the '80s that ripped perfectly as recently as last year. I've heard of discs with manufacturing defects that allow air to slowly reach the aluminum layer and oxidize them, but I have not seen this myself except on LaserDiscs.
THENATHE 4y ago
So what is the real solution here? I have a 2TB SSD in a caddy that I use for most of my stuff, then I have 2 disk RAID 1 array that is only used as periodic backup (only connected to power once a month) as well as having 2TB of cloud storage. I know I’m “good”, but it seems like there has to be a better way.
WalterBright 4y ago
There's no substitute for regularly copying stuff forward onto new media. This has become practical upon the advent of ever-increasing capacity disk drives.
bloomingeek 4y ago
I remember when CD-Rs were the savior of all our storage problems, and I weighed in heavily. They were easy to burn and very durable. BUT, just like VCR tapes were doomed because of the ease of coping video, CD's were doomed because of music and video coping. All media types are at the mercy of corporations with their own agendas. Just look a DVDs, Blu-Ray, they told us, would be better and longer lasting as far as use goes. But, really, who buys BR movies anymore? I love and use all USB drive devises now, and SSD and HDD. But how long before the corps determine it's no longer good for them?
JamesAdir 4y ago
Does anyone have any suggestion/information on how SSD are reliable for long term archival? When they are used only once to write and then stored away?

298 points by parasti 4y ago

All my cdr’s from late 90s have failed

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.

miked85 4y ago
> the lifetime of recordable optical discs can range from a couple of years to more than 200 years You are still in that range then
bzzzt 4y ago
Do you test the data is identical? I've got a stack of old CD-R's containing mp3 files from 20 years ago and lots have unreadable files or worse: data that reads correctly but won't play without glitches. (corrupt mp3's can produce loud spikes that are very bad for your ears and/or audio equipment) Most are fine though.
adrian_b 4y ago
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 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.
- em500 4y ago
  I think that optical disks is a lot like a Lemons market[1]. Buyers can't evaluate the quality (durability) of disks, so are not willing to pay high prices, which drives high quality suppliers out of the market, which causes buyers to offer even less, which drives even more quality suppliers out of the market, resulting in a death spiral. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
NL807 4y ago
Yep, same. Incidentally these were on Kodak Golds, which arguably were the best CD-R media you could buy.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

I thought all libraries using optical discs technology migrated to M-DISCs already.

karencarits 4y ago
Do we actually know that M-DISCs are much better than ordinary discs regarding longevity? I wasn't really convinced by the wikipedia page
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  For DVD (and the rare M-DISC CDR) yes. For BluRay there is nothing special about them.
  - mrfinn 4y ago
    Any references about the BluRay claim? Genuinely curious
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      Where can you get MDISC CDR?
  - em500 4y ago
    It's a bit more nuanced than that. Standard CD-R and DVD-R uses organic dyes for the recording layer, which are sensitive to light and humidity. M-DISC DVD-R used some proprietary inorganic layer, which was more durable in theory and in independent lab tests[1]. When BD-R was introduced, all discs used the same inorganic recording layer, including M-DISC BD-R. That, plus the lack of independent tests, plus the fact that the manufacturer Verbatim likes to muddy the waters between M-DISC DVD-R and BD-R, led some people to conclude that there is nothing special about M-DISC BD-R. However, after a few years, disc manufacturers started making BD-Rs using organic recording layers again with inferior durability[2]. Initially these were marked as "LTH" discs (with the original non-organic BD-Rs marked as "HTL"), but nowadays they mostly stopped marking them at all so you simply don't know what you buy. With M-DISC BD-R you'll likely get a HTL disc (but it's not garanteed, since they don't advertise it either). Additionally, there's more to durability than the recording layer (such as the material of the reflexive layer, and the overall build quality). And there is at least some anecdotal evidence that M-DISC BD-R are indeed more durable than the median BD-R[3,4]. The consensus among enthusiasts is that for BD-R, M-DISC and Panasonic HTL (Made in Japan) are very good. But they come with a big price premium (about $2 per disc vs $0.60 for some generic LTH disc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Durability_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Durability_claims [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable#Recording_mechanisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable#Record... [3] https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical-Disks.html https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical... [4] https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-revi...

squarefoot 4y ago

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 realized what was going on I backed up everything I could to hard drives in multiple copies, dumped them all and stopped using that media completely. Printed media last a lot more, but those CD/DVD R/RW to me are too unreliable to be used for anything beyond the occasional OS image install where USB boot isn't available.

yosito 4y ago
"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Sure - but with HDDs, you tend to just move all your stuff during each update cycle, because the new generation then tends to have a multiple of the capacity you've had before. 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?
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Plus your backup probably requires dozens of CDs and DVDs, and perhaps they then fit on a handful of 4TB drives, and perhaps now they fit on a single 20TB drive. For me, my storage needs increase more or less linearly, but storage capacity increases exponentially, making every cycle easier, involving less drives.
- xenadu02 4y ago
  Like DNA or living organisms: digital data has to be kept "live" to truly be secure, replicating itself somewhat regularly. Attempts to store it statically are cost-prohibitive or fail at much higher rates than claimed. Worse if the technology is on a down-hill trend because manufacturers focusing on quality are the first to go out of business (higher expenses in a shrinking market). 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.

jl6 4y ago

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, and then it won’t be long before the drives become a greater limit to longevity than the media.

sergers 4y ago
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 obsolete (not always) One day I just chucked it all out.... Years of archiving, downloading, burning ripping. Was a waste of time and money in hindsight
- pcf 4y ago
  Exactly the same here, except that I gave all those discs to friends. And I shudder to think how much time I wasted on all that archiving, when it ultimately wasn't worth it at all. 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.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The problem is that many times, the "originals" (or official sources) become unavailable. There's a ton of old 80s/90s DOS games and 8-bit games that we still have now because of digital hoarders. If it weren't for them, they'd be lost because the original companies are long gone and most people just trash stuff. Now look at how much stuff regularly disappears from video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

least 4y ago

I'm quite surprised that CD-Rs have such a long potential longevity, though I suppose they are only a certain kind (that I almost certainly have never used when I was burning CD-Rs) that are designed to be more durable. It also kind of assumes that they're keeping them in an environment suitable for archival purposes, which does not exist in my home. Still, even the lesser CD-Rs are rated for much longer than what I would have pegged them at, given just how many CD-Rs I have that have already begun deteriorating. Perhaps the ones I was buying in giant spindles weren't advisable for archival use. I've many CD-R that I or friends have burned that have their layering flaking off, making them completely useless, and I'm sure that many people out there do as well, which is why I am skeptical of using them for anything important. In the end, for people's personal archives, they should certainly follow typical data integrity advice (i.e. the 3-2-1 rule) and also importantly, heavily curating what they choose to hold on to.

ahartmetz 4y ago

I should check my archive, but as of years ago, I have yet to find one bad disk. Anyone who cared could easily read up about it: writing at maximum speed produces marginal media. Writing at lower speed produces media with lower initial error rate and higher contrast, so much better longevity.

xerox13ster 4y ago
That was the kind of thing that kind of just seemed logical to me back then. I don't remember reading it anywhere, I think I just had the perception from VHS tape recording lengths.

dmitrygr 4y ago

> CD-RW (erasable CD) 20 to 50 years 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.

neilv 4y ago

When I was using dual-layer DVD+R blanks for off-site backups, the folk wisdom on blanks I heard from someone who burnt discs a lot was: to get a particular type and brand, and make sure the unit had been manufactured in Singapore. The country/factory of manufacture was indicated on the packaging, but the SKU and UPC didn't reflect that. 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.)

bibaheu 4y ago
Hi, I do the BD M-Dics at home, with Linux, with 0 problems. What problems did you get?
- ruslan 4y ago
  I do backups of my home servers to BD-RE discs (BDXL 100GB) once a week from ZFS storage. The only problem is poor drive quality - for past five years I changed two dives (Asus branded, all different models). Seems they are not made for regular writes. So, the weak point is not the media itself but availability of dives which may just be missing in 20 years perspective.

mrfinn 4y ago

> 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.

ricardobeat 4y ago
I haven’t seen a BD-R in my entire life. In fact, the only use of BR I’ve had is on the PlayStation. The technology came way too late.
_int3_ 4y ago
That means first games for PS4 are already damaged.
- ace2358 4y ago
  I’m under the impression that ps4 discs are pressed. This article is about writable media. Writable media needs a dye or layer that can be ‘burnt’ Commercial disks don’t do this and instead are physically pressed. The dye material is the one that degrades over time. The pressed material doesn’t. Someone correct me if I’m wrong? Commercially pressed discs should last a very long time in comparison
  - brazzy 4y ago
    Basically correct, with a tiny caveat: there can be manufacturing defects where the reflective aluminum layer of pressed discs is not fully sealed and oxidizes over time.
steveBK123 4y ago
My educated guess would be something along these two threads: * Higher data density => tighter tolerance => same physical degradation is more catastrophic (DVD ~7x density of CD, BD-R ~20/10/5x DVD density = up to 140x CD density) * Produced later and therefore like all consumer goods, less regard for durability and more regard for absolute cost optimization

OptionX 4y ago

What 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.

derwiki 4y ago
Paper? We have family photos from the 1800s. Every bit of computer data I have from the 90 is gone.. except what I printed out.
agumonkey 4y ago
No matter the material, the storage conditions are crucial (sic). You want temperature, humidity, acidity, magnetic stability.
tuatoru 4y ago
Granite. Edit: 100 - 200 years is probably 2 to 5 pandemics, some of which may be considerably worse than the last one; and plenty of time for fires, floods, storms, earthquakes, and/or war (civil or other). Granite has a track record. Some stainless steels might be OK too (not for much longer than 200 years, though). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra's_Needle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra's_Needle
naikrovek 4y ago
there is no "archive and forget" method. the library of congress uses contemporary storage media (hard drives), and migrates everything to newer storage media as the previous media becomes obsolete and replacement hardware for that media stops being manufactured. they have learned that stockpiling old reading hardware and software isn't sufficient to be able to read that media in the future. they move everything to new media manually and archivists and volunteers work continuously to bring data on hardware more than one generation old into the current generation as everything progresses. source: I read it in a detailed article about the LoC a couple of years ago and have forgotten where. :(
4y ago

rvieira 4y ago

When I was younger I started doing a lot of personal mixtapes as a hobby. A few years later, I moved to "mix cds". These are all made from my personal music collection (which is not backed up in optical media). Just saying, because CDs to me became just a transient media to, say, transport music to my car's stereo[1]. Because of this I never really bothered about longevity, they are just digital cassettes. [1] - Yes, I could replace my car CD player with something else, but now it's a nostalgia thing :)

ricardobeat 4y ago

That longevity table is under archival conditions (climate controlled). The vast majority of CD-Rs I had, regardless of brand, were completely gone after 10 years of storage in an enclosed textile bag. CD-RW would barely last 2-3 years.

masklinn 4y ago
Brand / media quality also matters a lot. I had some cheapo bulk CD-R whose top (reflective) layer started flaking after a few years (stored in their sleeves in a cardboard box in a dry cabinet). Stuff from reputable brands still look great, but I haven’t hard had a CD or DVD player in years if not decades at this point so it might be a cesspool of data loss for all I know.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  I used to buy those thick white labelled discs in a spindle, with a green reflective layer, and remember them being quite a bit more expensive. Can’t say I I’ve ever noticed a difference. The ones that are still playable (I hope so? Last checked maybe 5 years ago) are all industrial pressings.

darkwater 4y ago

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 extracting an image, leave it doing its work for a couple of hours and... magic! I have a perfectly mountable disk image! I got to live again some >20 years old memories, pictures of younger me with my friends. stupid things you would save as a late nerd teen with access to the Internet and a ton of emails in Outlook Express format (guilty!) that I could not open yet. I guess the format is probably not super-hard to parse (most of the content is plain text actually) but since I'm here, if you know of something already existing to convert it to mbox/maildir it would be cool! [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

xerox13ster 4y ago
IIRC there was an import/conversion tool in Outlook 2003/2007.
pmontra 4y ago
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.
- darkwater 4y ago
  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!
  - grishka 4y ago
    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 hit or miss.

Test0129 4y ago

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 will likely have readers well into the next century. But you have to be very careful. There are a few brands, in particular Taiyo Yuden that are the absolute best. CMC Pro is a related brand with the same technology/longevity (and easier to get). You will pay quadruple the cost per CD but its worth every penny. Avoid Memorex, JVC, etc. Basically any brand you can pick up at your local big box retailer.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Taiyo Yuden I have not been able to buy these in the last few years. Also, when I was able to buy them, one had to be careful of counterfeits. Do you have a source for them?
- Paianni 4y ago
  TY closed down their own disc manufacturing in 2015. Nowadays the CMC Pro line (with 'Powered by TY Technology' branding) is the closest you're going to get.
- Test0129 4y ago
  I don't unfortunately. I use CMC Pro now which is highly regarded. They're "powered by TY technology" which I took to mean essentially white labeled TY, made in Taiwan, so I also assumed that CMC Pro was the actual producer of TY and now that TY is defunct CMC Pro took over selling stuff.
cdr 4y ago
I've always only bought Taiyo Yuden media since ~2000. Every CD-R and DVD-R I still have that I've tried is still readable. 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.

qwerty456127 4y ago

What about black CD-R disks?

sammalloy 4y ago

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 difference between DVD and CD manufacturing on a commercial level?

spicyjpeg 4y ago
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.
cdr 4y ago
There absolutely exist fungi that feeds on writable discs. Supposedly more common in tropical, humid areas.

fireflymetavrse 4y ago

Not 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.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
There's a (not very scientific) test here : http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...

_int3_ 4y ago

When CD was new, there was research that said it would last 1-5 years

chimineycricket 4y ago

At the end of the day for any serious archiving tape should be used, no?

8fingerlouie 4y ago
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.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...

Kiro 4y ago

Never had a CD, DVD, SSD or HDD fail on me since the 90s. I'm almost starting to believe it's a myth.

MayeulC 4y ago
You are lucky... And/or just don't have a large sample size. Of the multiple hundred CDs I've burned back in the day, some failed in just a few months. Admittedly, it was in tropical (high-humidity, high-temperature) settings. As for HDDs, I lost about a quarter to a half, with the rest just being obsolete these days. I can definitely attest from personal experience that hard disks from the same series tend to fail at the same point (I had 3 WD blue HDDs in a single computer, as system, data, archival disks; the system one failed, so I moved the system to the data one, which failed a bit after; so I retired the third one; failures happened at about the same runtime according to SMART data).

hyperluz 4y ago

From what I know, M-DISCs will last longer, both on its DVD and BluRay variants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

stared 4y ago

It is ironic that in a few hundred years, people will be able to read ancient inscriptions in stone but not information from our age.

cm2187 4y ago

As long as price per capacity / storage density increases exponentially, isn't the best solution to transfer your storage to a newer medium over and over rather than taking a bet on a long term durability of a medium that we have no way to test (and a bet on the durability and forward compatibility of the device to read it). A single $500 20TB hard drive can contain 30,000 CD ROMS and 500 Blurays. Surely the economics are there.

IvanaDora 4y ago

6stringmerc 4y ago

“Handing someone a demo CD is like saying to them, Hey, you throw this away.” (Can’t recall the comedian, could be Dimitri Martin) It’s funny but burned CDs are a great handout for me. I can see through DistroKid that some people loaded them into iTunes and I got a small match but if money for it. Considering how cheap they are and “put in walk away repeat” the process is, I’m still happy to crank them out now and again. Plus! I have CD labels so they have personality and flair. Also they fit a 40-60 minute DJ set perfectly. Burn, pop in the car, party on the go baby.

FroshKiller 4y ago
It was Mitch Hedberg joking about getting a receipt for buying a doughnut.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Mitch Hedberg sounds right but I remember the joke as being about someone handing out paper advertisements on the street. The doughnut joke is a different one I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5pjBmNyrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5pjBmNyrE Also, for someone who died going on 2 decades ago, he's really got some staying power; I see kids discovering him and liking him to this day.
  - michaelgrafl 4y ago
    He made great jokes exclusively in a format that is usually reserved for bad jokes. He was a genius.
    - 6stringmerc 4y ago
      So much so it creeps into real life for me from time to time. About 10 years ago working in the Comerica building in downtown Dallas (you can see it in the skyline photos) I parked in a garage connected by hallways and tunnels to stay out of the heat or rain. There were two sets of escalators in this route. One set broke. Management put up a sign on a stand stating “Escalator out of service” and within about a week somebody opened Word or PowerPoint set it to landscape, printed out “Escalator temporarily stairs, sorry for the convenience” on a piece of paper and taped it over their sign. I’m sure I snapped a picture of it for the week or so it was left up.

RalfWausE 4y ago

After reviving a PC i had in the late 90s a couple of weeks ago i investigated this big box of CD-Rs standing besides it (in an unisolated attic in germany... so temperatures from about -5 °C to >35 °C), most of the CDs were burnt in a period from around '96 - 2005, many ... ehm... "off site backups" of games and other software but also personal files. What can i say... every CD i put in the drive worked flawlessly. I think it sometimes comes down to pure dumb luck.

nekoashide 4y ago
Quality can vary a lot, back in the late 90's you had certain brands and disc you would buy because of how much extra data you could write to them and also testing to see which disc performed better at higher writing speeds. It was a big deal to some folks back then and you likely bought the high quality ones.

mrjin 4y ago

Nah, my personal experience told me it's highly unlikely that long. Last time I checked my CD/DVD archives of around 10 years old. Checked some random 20% of all, 50% were completely unreadable, 30% readable but with noticeable losses, other seemed to be good but still I had no confidence of the integrity of the data. So I dumped all of them, even almost of full bucket of 50 unused DVD-Rs and quite a few DVD-RWs. Since then I did not really touched any optical drives at all. To my surprise, all my data left on HDDs or Flash drives were still good without any issues.

Sporktacular 4y ago

I wonder how M-Discs verifiably stack up in comparison.

mavhc 4y ago

DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) 10 to 20 years Why are they so bad compared to a disc that was burnt?

ephbit 4y ago

Since I saw ddrescue mentioned. I really found Dvdisaster helpful for rescuing DVDs. The only strange thing is, that somehow the version I can currently install from my package manager appears to be missing functionality that was once available when I installed it from Debian packages a few years ago.

smarx007 4y ago

Is anyone using M-disks and what's your experience so far? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://web.archive.org/web/20130422110903if_/http://www.mdisc.com:80/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod_04feb2010_a.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130422110903if_/http://www.mdi...

GnarfGnarf 4y ago
I just started using M-Discs last month. Bought a compatible burner, a Pioneer Blu-ray Disc (BDR-XD07B), CAD $170. I'm pleased to report that my burning software (ImgBurn) worked fine with the new Pioneer DVD drive. At $10 a pop, one is very prudent when choosing what to backup.
vel0city 4y ago
I have some M-DISC DVD's from ~15 years ago that still read fine. That said I still have a lot of cheap CDs from 20 years ago that still read fine as well. I've had a 25GB M-DISC BD-R kicking around on my desk without a sleeve or case for a while now to test durability. Sometimes I take it outside and leave it on my patio table for a few days to add some extra wear. I slide it around the desk, pick it up with normal greasy/dirty hands and handle it non-gently, flex it a bit, wash it off in the sink, and wipe it off with a cotton cloth. After four years of this abuse so far it still hasn't lost a single bit of data. I have noticed some of it takes a bit longer to get a good read so I'll probably lose data soon but this has been a hell of a lot of abuse so far.
gruez 4y ago
There's allegedly nothing different special about blu-ray M-DISCs >Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products. https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifetime-archival-millenniatam-disc-4x-bd-r-25gb/ https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifet...
4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

There was a panic circa 1980 about the longevity of color cinema film. Martin Scorsese pointed out the cultural loss but it was also a big dollar and cents loss because home video was on its way as a way to turn old movies into cash. People looked at quite a few different answers, including copying the movies and separating them into three films, one for each color, but the problem was simply solved when people discovered you can greatly extend the life of dyes by storing them in the freezer. You have to keep them out of light also. Conversely, high temperatures accelerate aging. I have a room in my house (an old farmhouse with uncontrolled humidity) which is very bright and somewhat intemperate (and also has a lot of indoor wildlife) and I’ve found prints made with fugitive dyes fade badly in six months — I didn’t get mad instead I use it for accelerated aging tests, I make two prints and store one in the dark and put the other in the wall. There is a book about this stuff at http://wilhelm-research.com/ http://wilhelm-research.com/

jjkaczor 4y ago

Once made a quick $5k, because a former client had started using CD-RW for their "enterprise" backups, 10-years later they had unreadable data and contacted me to see if I still had some source-code. Checked my stack of hard-drives, and... Yes... yes, I did have a working copy. That cemented it in my personal world - NAS with also HD's is the way to go.

quesera 4y ago
Both you and client got lucky there. Many contract agreements would not allow you to keep the data, and you'd be more likely to be sued than paid! But I agree that (maintained NAS >> removable media). :)

steveBK123 4y ago

Interesting that it looks like Blu-Rays in all forms have much shorter longevity than the preceding DVD and CD formats. Presumably due to tighter tolerances required to fit more data on the same platter size? I had switched to large format 50-100GB M-DISC BD-Rs a few years ago, but to be honest I'm often too lazy to bother with the process of burning discs for offline storage. I should probably upgrade my NAS/external HDD&SDD stack again. I would advise anyone going the NAS route to think carefully and read reviews on RAID devices. It's probably safer & easier to keep 2 copies in 2 formats on 2 different media in the end. I have had numerous consumer grade NAS RAID devices fail to the point I almost find it an additional failure mode rather than level of safety. Fragility of consumer grade RAID reminds me there's a reason our employers hire storage engineers!

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

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 years to a century.

xattt 4y ago
Sprinklers, as well as waterless fire suppression systems, are fairly recent inventions so their mettle has not been really tested on the time scale of document archiving.
bluGill 4y ago
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)

grafelic 4y ago

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/CH57-3-1-27-2005-eng.pdf 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.

GnarfGnarf 4y ago

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.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> MD5 checksums Better do recovery records, that way you would able to recover data and not only know it was corrupted. RAR recovery records, if storing in an archive is okay, or PAR.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

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?

em500 4y ago
Yes, the processes are very different. Commercial discs have physical pits pressed in the recording layer, while burned disks just use the laser to change the reflexity of the layer (which is some dye or phase changing alloy).

Roark66 4y ago

It would be really useful to have some storage media that can truly last 50 years. It is pretty disappointing that most of the media with useful capacity (dvd r etc) cap out at 20~50 years. I wouldn't trust the most commonly used storage now (usb thumb drives) with important data for even few years unless it was stored in triplicate. Personally I think the best method of long term data storage is spinning hard drives stored disconnected. I have a collection of them that goes back decades (with important data duplicated on multiple drives) including my first ever hard drive bought in mid 90s. Of my entire collection only one HDD broke down (actually one of newer 1tb usb3 drives bought few years ago - it started clicking few weeks ago). I can't vouch for the current spinning disc tech, but I distrust current SSD tech(SD cards and nvme included) more so my current data gets backed up to a set of spinning discs frequently.

1970-01-01 4y ago

I have binders full of cheap Staples CD-Rs from the early 2000s that literally flaked and peeled. I also have Sony CD-R discs in the exact same binders from the same time period. The Sony discs are fine.

mjhagen 4y ago
I have a couple of those flaked/peeled disks, those are gone beyond hope, right?
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Undamaged tracks can still be read. Set the drive to the lowest spin speed and go for it.

at_a_remove 4y ago

I am surprised that we're still stuck at Blu-Ray levels of data storage on disc. I would have thought we would be up to a terabyte or so by now, but everything has stagnated. Tape remains expensive for the home data hoarder, and there is a point at which cloud storage becomes more expensive than tape.

pgalvin 4y ago
Sony and Panasonic are making 500GB optical disks as an LTO tape alternative for businesses (See Sony’s “Optical Disc Archive” - Panasonic has a different name for the same standard). However, these don’t really have a use for consumers. CDs had music, DVDs and Blu-rays had television and films, but there is unfortunately no compelling use case given home media is turning to streaming. Additionally, for many, cloud storage is replacing the need for local storage in spite of its drawbacks.
Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
I'd like Microsoft Project Silica to come to the market. Basically laser burning your data onto a cube of glass, like CD-Rs it is write once read many, but it can store so, so much more, and also once the bits are 'drilled' into glass...there is nothing to delaminate or stop reflecting. Is the glass scratched? No? Then a reading laser can see the bit state.

everdrive 4y ago

Does anyone have longevity information on commercially-pressed CDs and DVDs? I know that from my own experience they last longer, but not forever. When they were new, one of CD's major selling points was their longevity. This seems have been wildly over-estimated, however.

j_not_j 4y ago

Beware of silent corruption in your disk arrays. https://www.nsc.liu.se/lcsc2007/presentations/LCSC_2007-kelemen.pdf https://www.nsc.liu.se/lcsc2007/presentations/LCSC_2007-kele... Disks didn't always write a block in the correct place. Things are better now, but still not perfect. I would recommend that you read all your data all the time; this ensures RAID-1 or ZFS will correct the silent bitrot. Hopefully. A megabyte or two per second read rate is all you need. See the pdf for more. There is a git archive at https://gitlab.com/fsprobe https://gitlab.com/fsprobe for a reader utility.

astrostl 4y ago

"DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) 10 to 20 years" This is literally unbelievable to me. I have yet to encounter or hear about a single instance of a commercial disc failure, and that goes all the way back to double-sided DVDs in the old paper cases with a clip.

babypuncher 4y ago

Recordable media is a crapshoot. Some discs are great, others are terrible. I wouldn't trust CD/DVD-R for long term media storage. These discs can also be harder on your optical drive. I've seen lots of Sega Dreamcast and Xbox consoles with prematurely worn out lasers because the owners mostly played burned games. Pressed media has held up pretty well in my collection. I have CDs from the '80s that ripped perfectly as recently as last year. I've heard of discs with manufacturing defects that allow air to slowly reach the aluminum layer and oxidize them, but I have not seen this myself except on LaserDiscs.

THENATHE 4y ago

So what is the real solution here? I have a 2TB SSD in a caddy that I use for most of my stuff, then I have 2 disk RAID 1 array that is only used as periodic backup (only connected to power once a month) as well as having 2TB of cloud storage. I know I’m “good”, but it seems like there has to be a better way.

WalterBright 4y ago

There's no substitute for regularly copying stuff forward onto new media. This has become practical upon the advent of ever-increasing capacity disk drives.

bloomingeek 4y ago

I remember when CD-Rs were the savior of all our storage problems, and I weighed in heavily. They were easy to burn and very durable. BUT, just like VCR tapes were doomed because of the ease of coping video, CD's were doomed because of music and video coping. All media types are at the mercy of corporations with their own agendas. Just look a DVDs, Blu-Ray, they told us, would be better and longer lasting as far as use goes. But, really, who buys BR movies anymore? I love and use all USB drive devises now, and SSD and HDD. But how long before the corps determine it's no longer good for them?

JamesAdir 4y ago

Does anyone have any suggestion/information on how SSD are reliable for long term archival? When they are used only once to write and then stored away?