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I stumbled across a DVD-RW last weekend and popped it in a drive to see if the files were still readable. I had read that for a -RW drive you shouldn't expect

I stumbled across a DVD-RW last weekend and popped it in a drive to see if the files were still readable. I had read that for a -RW drive you shouldn't expect more than a few years, maybe a decade before it decays so I was not hopeful. However, the disc was fully readable and the checksums all came back clean even though it was burned in 2003.

jagged-chisel 2y ago
And you immediately made a copy, right? Right?
- alt227 2y ago
  Two rights dont make a wrong
  - defrost 2y ago
    They do make a U-turn.
    - shmeeed 2y ago
      Please only try this in countries with left-hand traffic.
- jandrese 2y ago
  It wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data was important I wouldn't have left it on degrading optical media that I didn't trust. Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.