[HN Gopher] Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
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Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
Author : zdw
Score : 56 points
Date : 2024-05-02 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.canada.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.canada.ca)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Has 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I have two out of hundreds. Both were about 10 years old when
| they first encountered issues.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Commercially 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
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| Search 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| M-DISC is not mentioned here (manufacturer claimed 1000y+
| longevity); anyone know anything about that?
| steve1977 wrote:
| I use them, can report back in 1000 years if you like
| sgt wrote:
| Are you going to live that long?
| felurx wrote:
| Neither 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.)
| 486sx33 wrote:
| It seems cassette (VHS) has had the best longevity
| aidenn0 wrote:
| In 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.
| miles wrote:
| Strange that such an article fails to mention M-DISC:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/zv1nte/mdisc_i...
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1106325/are-m-disks-truly-mo...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...
| em500 wrote:
| Note 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 wrote:
| Also apparently Verbatim are selling fake M Discs
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv
| walterbell wrote:
| Manufacturer 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-licenseeli...
| grumpyprole wrote:
| Either the original M-Disc BDR marketing was bullsh*t or
| this response is. Whichever way it is, it doesn't make
| Verbatim look good.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Did Verbatim ever look good?
|
| Afaicr, the writable optical media market has been race-
| to-the-bottom since ~2000.
| bayindirh wrote:
| None of my Verbatim discs (at least >20 recently
| accessed, maybe >200 over the years incl. the ones I have
| given away) rotted/corrupted after a decade. I don't
| think they're bad.
| password4321 wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38742585 Optical
| Media Durability (2020)
|
| > https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat...
|
| --
|
| M-DISC on HN:
| 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
| _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 per
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981#39170038
| steve1977 wrote:
| There are BD-XL (100 GB) M-DISCs. I use them as a backup for
| family pictures.
| hinkley wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Today's personal offline backup is a new max-TB external HD
| every Black Friday/Cyber Monday!
| hinkley wrote:
| True, but I was thinking more archivist and professional
| librarian.
| tombert wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| | 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ics wrote:
| At the time I (and my dad) were buying CD-R and DVD-R for
| storing/backing up home media, we still had dial-up
| internet. "Research" was precious time on the phone line
| and while I am one to indulge in an excursion down the
| presumably gratuitous information rabbit hole on many
| topics, the archival-ness of burned discs never occurred to
| me. It must have been a discussion on it here on HN, many
| years after the last time I used disc drive for burning,
| that I realized it was something worth thinking about.
| tombert wrote:
| That's a valid reason; sadly I don't have it. My family
| was the first that I knew of (personally) to get cable
| internet, we had it in some capacity since 1999, so our
| internet was fast and unlimited. We should have done a
| Google search.
|
| Still, I don't feel like we came to the conclusion of CDs
| being archive-grade on our own, someone probably told us
| that a "CD will last forever" and we just never
| questioned it.
| ics wrote:
| Coming from floppy disks which were always a fridge (or
| file cabinet) magnet away from total destruction it made
| sense. I didn't know that anything after vinyl LPs were
| pressed so burned with a laser just sounded much more
| permanent than bit-flipped-by-magnet. Meaning, faster
| internet wouldn't have made me any more likely to
| question this stuff but made it easier if by chance I
| came across some advice to do so. Anyway it's 2024 and my
| dad still has floppies (working) _and_ cable internet,
| but the world still turns 'round I guess.
| teeray wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| sounds like a fun project for someone. you could go so far as
| to direct the user to the proper location on a shelf.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When a 32Gb USB stick is $3, why are you thinking about a 1Gb
| CD?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Copy 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 wrote:
| I 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...
|
| 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This makes me wonder how the recordings on the Voyager 1 & 2
| spacecraft [https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-
| the-reco...] will sound if they're ever heard.
| pabloarteel wrote:
| I wonder how vinyl records compare to CDs in terms of durability
| and longevity, ignoring capacity and practicality. Any insights?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have vinyl records going back to the 1920s, and they're just
| fine.
| shuntress wrote:
| Capacity 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 wrote:
| Consumer-grade Project Silica please save me from this long-term
| storage hellscape.
| jakedata wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| y04nn wrote:
| For real archival of large amount of data, LTO tapes are your
| best bet I think.
| password4321 wrote:
| Any 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.
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