6 ms·
Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
- Workaccount2 3y agoHas anyone had an otherwise undamaged DVD fail on them? By now there should be plenty of nearly 25 year old dvds out there that have done nothing but sit in a case on a shelf since 1999.
- 486sx33 3y agoCommercially produced DVDs don’t fail due to age in my experience, but they do get scratched or corroded to the point of being error riddled. Burnt CD-R and DVD-R definitely had a reduced life. CD-RW even worse
- aidenn0 3y agoI have two out of hundreds. Both were about 10 years old when they first encountered issues.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoI've had corrosion. Literal rust spots forming on the metal layer. Similar to how mirrors get that mold/rust growing between the silver layer and glass. I have not been keeping the DVDs in a controlled environment. They have been in a garage in a high humidity region. I think you could keep them indefinitely in a humidity controlled environment but for the average user they will corrode just like old mirrors do.
- alamortsubite 3y agoWe had an early CD burner in our lab at my first job out of grad school. I used to burn CD "mixtapes" for friends with it, a fun novelty in 1995. Recently, I found a couple of these stashed among the many boxes of CDs in my basement. Although they weren't stored in the manner recommended by TFA, they ripped without trouble. It's fun listening to them again after almost 30 years.
- sumtechguy 3y agoSearch for DVD disc rot on youtube. There are many channels talking about it. There is a chunk of them from 2007-2011 that have a bad rot issue. There is also a chunk of laserdisc that have similar issues from the early 90s. Usually it is the process to make the plastic is done wrong and the layers start to delaminate from each other. I have also had them come right out of the box and have errors. No visible issues. But the thing just will not read in particular places on the movie.
- drivers99 3y agoI have a DVD of Apollo 13 (from 1998 I believe) that won't play at all for no discernible reason (no coloration, no scratches). That's the only one I've ever had a problem with. Then again, I haven't gone through all my DVDs, well, ever. Maybe something to try when I'm really bored.
- asciimov 3y agoYes, 6 or 7 years ago I went through and digitized my family’s dvds and cds (music, movies, data, games) For factory printed discs, bit rot caused data loss in 8 to 10% of the discs. 2 to 3% were a total loss. Those loses were closer to 20-25% for burnable media. 90%+ lived a very comfortable life, climate controlled and protected from UV.
- aidenn0 3y agoM-DISC is not mentioned here (manufacturer claimed 1000y+ longevity); anyone know anything about that?
- steve1977 3y agoI use them, can report back in 1000 years if you like
- sgt 3y agoAre you going to live that long?
- felurx 3y agoNeither here or there, but I saw an election poster for a single issue party a while ago that asked "Where do you want to live in 800 years?" (The single issue being lifespan extension through medicine.)
- steve1977 3y agoMy bigger concern is finding a working Blu Ray drive then ;)
- vkaku 3y agoAlways save a copy of a working PC and Blu-Ray drive that is solar/ambient light powered along with that data. And maybe printed instructions on how to push the power on button. If we are lucky and the beings of that era understand how to get all this together, and decide to pull your data out, it'll be validated.
- 486sx33 3y agoIt seems cassette (VHS) has had the best longevity
- aidenn0 3y agoIn my experience phthalocyanine recordable CDs work much more reliably than VHSs. I don't have any DVD-Rs old enough to make a legitimate comparison.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miles 3y agoStrange that such an article fails to mention M-DISC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/zv1nte/mdisc_is_really_underrated/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/zv1nte/mdisc_i... https://superuser.com/questions/1106325/are-m-disks-truly-more-reliable-than-other-forms-of-storage https://superuser.com/questions/1106325/are-m-disks-truly-mo... https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...
- em500 3y agoNote that the majority of tests and durability claims about M-DISC (particularly about the special recording layer) are about M-DISC DVD-Rs. Although manufacturer likes to conflate them in marketing, it's not clear whether the M-DISC BR-Rs are any different than regular HTL BD-Rs.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoAlso apparently Verbatim are selling fake M Discs https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv
- walterbell 3y agoManufacturer response: Verbatim clarified that these discs were advancements. The technical changes resulted in a different appearance and the ability for higher burning speeds, the changed media-ID was due to an adaptation with regard to other Verbatim products. Verbatim had already shipped the first modified media in early 2022. The data security of the new discs is not inferior to that of the old discs: Data should also last 1000 years, according to the manufacturer. How was the 1000-year lifespan for M-Disc media calculated? If there's a chemical process for simulating centuries of media degradation, then it could be applied to the new Verbatim media to evaluate their longevity claims. There must be an industry association which licenses the M-Disc trademark and disk identifier? If the Verbatim media is legit, they can be issued a unique, approved disk ID by the M-Disc trademark licensing body. Edit: list of identifiers, https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseelist.php# https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli...
- password4321 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38742585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38742585 Optical Media Durability (2020) > https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-update.html https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat... -- M-DISC on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=m-disc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=m-disc&sort=byDate&type=commen... My understanding is it was something unique for DVDs (which are no longer manufactured) but not much difference anymore for Blu-ray. [edit] > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967#33595128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967#33595128 BD-R discs using inorganic dyes are durable enough that the M-Disc branding is likely moot -- 300GB https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981#39170038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981#39170038
- steve1977 3y agoThere are BD-XL (100 GB) M-DISCs. I use them as a backup for family pictures.
- hinkley 3y agoI haven’t heard a conversation about the archival implications of these constraints in a good long time. It used to be a somewhat common topic. The failure mode is not having enough hardware for copying from medium A to medium B, such that the bandwidth of the system means that by the time you try to copy the last archive to the new media, either the old media has decayed or you’ve already started copying to a new generation of storage because the oldest records in the new medium is already decaying. And each generation there’s more to copy, soaking up the improvements in read or write time.
- password4321 3y agoToday's personal offline backup is a new max-TB external HD every Black Friday/Cyber Monday!
- hinkley 3y agoTrue, but I was thinking more archivist and professional librarian.
- tombert 3y agoMy dad always bought the cheapest DVD-Rs (the "free with rebate" specials they they would have at Best Buy and CompUSA in 2003-2007) to put home movies and we're definitely seeing disc rot issues now when trying to back up the videos and plop them on a Jellyfin server. Fortunately, my dad was kind of a nut about burning a bunch of copies of DVDs (he lost a big paper in graduate school in the 80's because he hadn't backed up the document he was working on because of a floppy corruption I think), so everything is redundant across like five discs, and I don't think we've actually lost any footage. Neither my dad nor I knew how writable media like that worked at the time, and I think we both assumed that, assuming they didn't get scratched, they would last forever. Obviously we were wrong.
- kevstev 3y ago| Neither my dad nor I knew how writable media like that worked at the time, and I think we both assumed that, assuming they didn't get scratched, they would last forever. Obviously we were wrong. I am surprised at this, as the CD age highlighted the importance of quality media. At one point you would actually mentally allocate 2-3 cds for any thing you would want to burn to account for frequent issues. Kodak Golds became the bar for quality, I think I still have a bunch of unused ones on a spindle in a box somewhere. Interestingly enough, I still have a whole lot of burned and unburned CDs, but don't actually have a reader for them these days. It wasn't even something I was aware of, my desktops gave way to laptops, and new ones didn't include an optical media drive, and now I just don't have a cd/dvd reader.
- tombert 3y agoI mean, honestly, I don't think either my dad nor I did any research on the quality of the DVDs we were buying. I think, for whatever reason, we just assumed that there wasn't a fundamental difference between the cheap and expensive stuff. Obviously we should have researched it more if we were using it for preservation. I keep a USB blu-ray drive around because I like to have rips of my physical media, and it seems to read CDs just fine. None of my computers have a CD drive built in anymore.
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- teeray 3y agoIs there some way to use CDs / DVDs / Blu-Rays as an incremental backup target? It'd be nice to take something like Restic, aim it at some hot backup HDD, then when enough deltas have been written to that volume have it burn a disk. It would be great if the entire experience is "if the drive is open, take the disk out, label it (according to some scheme), shelve it, and drop a new blank disk in".
- ulchar 3y agosounds like a fun project for someone. you could go so far as to direct the user to the proper location on a shelf.
- WalterBright 3y agoWhen a 32Gb USB stick is $3, why are you thinking about a 1Gb CD?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> When a 32Gb USB stick is $3, why are you thinking about a 1Gb CD? I've got data CDs from 1998 still reading fine. There are CDs and DVDs listed in TFA as having 50 to 100 years of longevity. How's that 32 GB stick going to do in 50 years if left untouched from now till then? I've never heard about USB sticks for long term archiving.
- WalterBright 3y agoCopy them forward every years. You can fit 32 CDs on a $3 USB stick. $3/year sounds like a trivial amount of money for anyone. > There are CDs and DVDs listed in TFA as having 50 to 100 years of longevity. Nobody has ever tested that.
- neilv 3y agoI just added HDD back into my mix of personal backups. I was relying almost entirely on SSD and USB flash drives, and then I read how temperature-sensitive an SSD might be when left unpowered on the shelf: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data... I've used DVD+R DL for backups in the past, but it was painfully slow and coaster-prone, even if I tried to use blanks from a particular factory of a particular brand that was said to be more reliable. Also, not enough capacity anymore. M-Disc BD has the drawback of being Blu-ray, which seems to have gratuitously obnoxious things about it that I don't want to deal with on Linux.
- Dalewyn 3y agoAs the old saying goes for backups: At least 3 copies. At least 2 different media types. At least 1 copy off site. SSDs and flash drives are both NAND flash (albeit of significantly different qualities), so that violates #2. As for me? I backup onto a local NAS (1 copy) and forget about it (1 media type [HDD], 0 off site). Why? Because impracticality is a fucking hard mistress, that's why. At least I have more than 0 copies, unlike most people.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> M-Disc BD has the drawback of being Blu-ray, which seems to have gratuitously obnoxious things about it that I don't want to deal with on Linux. I don't have one yet (still burning DVDs) but what'd be the obnoxious things to deal with when burning Blu-ray discs on Linux compared to burning DVDs?
- vkaku 3y agoThere are no drawbacks if you have a Blu-Ray drive. Even the software and the filesystem I use to write on them - UDF 1.02 - are supported on computers 25 years older, even Windows 98. Since this is read-only, it makes it a safe choice. It's almost as if one is very comfortable with CDs, and then had to a 6x bump to DVDs, and then a further 6x bump to BDs. And then another 4x bump to 100GB BDs. Only difference is that the FS you may end up using may not have Joliet/ISO9660 portions but just plain old UDF. You can always write any ISOs you want to smaller discs, or avoid long file names etc. and stay compatible - and if you're building data backups, do your research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format There is some concern because some distributions in the past used to deny/disallow the UDF module https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/115269/centos-6-4-unable-to-mount-disc-doesnt-like-udf https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/115269/centos-6-4-u... but I've never run into any problems using a UDF image, like, ever. Linux support on any 2.4.x kernel and above has been fine.
- bookofjoe 3y agoThis makes me wonder how the recordings on the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft [https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/sounds/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-reco...] will sound if they're ever heard.
- pabloarteel 3y agoI wonder how vinyl records compare to CDs in terms of durability and longevity, ignoring capacity and practicality. Any insights?
- WalterBright 3y agoI have vinyl records going back to the 1920s, and they're just fine.
- shuntress 3y agoCapacity and Practicality are the major difference. If you do ignore those though, vinyl is a much better long-term data storage solution than CD. A quick internet search suggest that a regular 12" record should have a capacity of around ~10-20MB. That is just enough to store one regular JPG photo. There seem to be print shops that will press records for you at the cost of around ~$100/copy (minimum run 100 copies). So to back up my ~1,000-ish photos per year I just need a climate controlled warehouse and 99 friend-with-warehouses to distribute backups too!
- shuntress 3y agoConsumer-grade Project Silica please save me from this long-term storage hellscape.
- jakedata 3y agoI purchased spindles of archival grade CD-R and DVD-R disks for family media archives back around 20 years ago. They were expensive but worthwhile so far. The reel-to-reel tapes I was transcribing were literally falling apart as they played one last time. Others suffered from the hydroscopic substrate that made them twist and curl. I didn't know about tape baking back then. I have a media capture kit that includes 4mm and 8mm video, VHS, reel-to-reel and a bunch of adapters. I pipe all the video into a DVD recorder and also an HDMI to USB adapter so I can capture everything twice with one play.
- jakedata 3y agoIt is extremely important to not apply sticky labels to the back side of optical disks. The actual medium is just under the top surface and can be pulled up by aging adhesive. Similarly, be extremely careful writing on disks using permanent marker. Some solvents can also damage the backing.
- einsteinx2 3y agoWhile that’s true for CDs, with DVDs and I assume Blu-rays as well the layer you’re talking about is in the center sandwiched by plastic on both top and bottom.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> DVD-R (gold metal layer) 50 to 100 years These are the only DVDs listed with such a long life. I don't care about RW. Anyone know a brand/model of such DVDs I can still buy today? (and, yup, I'm one of those still burning DVDs with important data on it and, no, I don't have that much important data and, no, I don't backup only on DVDs) P.S: speaking of which it's a major PITA but most PC cases brand/models do not offer anymore a slot for a DVD reader/burner. I really dig my "Be Quiet!" tower (Pure Base 500 / military/beige color) but there's no 5"1/4 slot to put a DVD reader in there. It pisses me off so much I may re-assemble my modern PC in an old case : (
- bayindirh 3y agoI have never lost data from well cared TDK and Verbatim disks. TDK even had scratch-proof hardened DVDs. For extremely important data, I’d burn three copies enhanced with dvdisaster error correction data. I recently moved these disks to a distributed/backed up storage system since I’m low on physical space. All disks read at full speed with no hiccups. Another alternative is M-Discs if you can find them.
- flyingspaceship 3y agoVerbatim has an "archival" brand which appears to be the gold disks. m disks are interesting. can function as dvds and last 1000 years (allegedly). so if you're trying to write something to disk that you want the civilization after ours to be able to read it's a solid choice
- y04nn 3y agoFor real archival of large amount of data, LTO tapes are your best bet I think.
- password4321 3y agoAny recommendations for software tools and/or techniques to recover data from damaged discs? I've frozen a floppy disk for one last successful read before.