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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Always 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.
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.
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.
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.
Actual user here. Some of them seem to be unreliable (I have those 100GB discs) and not like the older batches I had. DM me for stats if you are interested in knowing what happened.
But they're not fake - apparently they got bought out and the new media IDs belong to them.
Verbatim 25GB M-Discs are great. Have an archival copy of my files in addition to my NAS stuff. The important files are often small, so I use regular these smaller capacity M-Discs for them.
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.
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.
| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought a cheap USB DVD burner for this reason. I don't expect to read a lot of optical discs, but they are something that is easy to deploy when using old computers that can't USB boot, and it was only about $25.
This is one of the cases that a magneto-optical system like MiniDisc excels at. It's not fast (though, if it had been financially viable for Sony, who knows what it would look like now), but it's far more persistent than CD/DVD-R's, because there's no dye to break down - it's just physics. My audio MiniDiscs are as good today as they were when I recorded them 20 years ago.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
There 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
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-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.
For short-term backups flash memories are very reliable.
They are unreliable for long-term storage without using them. They are guaranteed for only one year of cold storage, because their memory-cell capacitors will slowly discharge.
When the flash memories are new, i.e. they have not been written multiple times, they may hold their data for more than the guaranteed one year, but for archival purposes you should never count on being lucky.
You can extend the storage time on flash memories by reading them periodically, because if they have good firmware for their controllers then they will automatically rewrite any sector that has been read with errors.
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!
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.
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.
While 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.
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 : (
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.
Verbatim 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
62 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadBurnt CD-R and DVD-R definitely had a reduced life. CD-RW even worse
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv
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...
Afaicr, the writable optical media market has been race-to-the-bottom since ~2000.
But they're not fake - apparently they got bought out and the new media IDs belong to them.
Verbatim 25GB M-Discs are great. Have an archival copy of my files in addition to my NAS stuff. The important files are often small, so I use regular these smaller capacity M-Discs for them.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is one of the cases that a magneto-optical system like MiniDisc excels at. It's not fast (though, if it had been financially viable for Sony, who knows what it would look like now), but it's far more persistent than CD/DVD-R's, because there's no dye to break down - it's just physics. My audio MiniDiscs are as good today as they were when I recorded them 20 years ago.
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.
> There are CDs and DVDs listed in TFA as having 50 to 100 years of longevity.
Nobody has ever tested that.
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.
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.
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?
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
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-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.
I have bad experiences with HD and optical, while having positive experiences with Flash. But I've read blog posts claiming exactly the opposite.
Nowadays I have copies on at least 2 Flash and 1 HD for the important but not so voluminous stuff.
They are unreliable for long-term storage without using them. They are guaranteed for only one year of cold storage, because their memory-cell capacitors will slowly discharge.
When the flash memories are new, i.e. they have not been written multiple times, they may hold their data for more than the guaranteed one year, but for archival purposes you should never count on being lucky.
You can extend the storage time on flash memories by reading them periodically, because if they have good firmware for their controllers then they will automatically rewrite any sector that has been read with errors.
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!
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.
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 : (
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.
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
I've frozen a floppy disk for one last successful read before.