I no longer trust optical media for storage

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tybert7

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Going over an old spindle of burned cds and dvds, I find an interesting result. Most of the discs are compromised.


They were not stored in some exotic location with wildly fluctuating temperatures, they were safe, and over time, they just degrade.

It seems beyond stupid to have an optical disc degrade, to have the format be so pathetic and feckless that its primary purpose FAILS to deliver.

Only hard drives from now on until something more robust comes around, or I can be convinced there are safe discs/formats out there.
 
I have music and data CDs I burned 11 years ago, with scratches on them, that still work fine. I am on the opposite side, I like CDs.
 
Do you label your cds and dvds with a regular sharpie marker pen? I use to do that and some of the cds and dvds won't read over time.
 
cds fair a bit better, the dvds are spotty, about 5-7 years old.


Someone needs to make a hitler reaction video to the low lifespan
 
HardwareGuru said:
Do you label your cds and dvds with a regular sharpie marker pen? I use to do that and some of the cds and dvds won't read over time.
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Never heard of that, when I do label, I do use a sharpie. What do you use if not a Sharpie?
 
Hey, if you want longevity:

Azo dye CD-Rs are dark blue in color, and their formulation is patented by Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation. Azo dye is also chemically stable, and Azo CD-Rs are typically rated with a lifetime of decades. Azo is the most resistant dye against UV rays and begins to degrade only after the third or fourth week of direct sunlight exposure. More modern implementations of this kind of dye include Super Azo which is not as deep blue as the earlier Metal Azo. This change of composition was necessary in order to achieve faster writing speeds.
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...gle-_-CD/DVD+R/RW+Media-_-VERBATIM-_-17507002

All other writable optical disc technologies use relatively unstable organic dyes. It's cheaper, but won't last long.
 
Think the life time of a CD is ~ 10 years. So those of you pushing that mark, I'd make backups.

I've had disks go bad in 3 years and a few that are pushing 12 years years and work fine.
 
In before "CDs/DVDs lol. Use tape".

There is a guy that (pretty much) says that every time someone mentions the words backup and CD/DVD.
 
CDs do not last as long as DVDs. its a universal truth. Also, buy quality discs for storage and you will be fine. the sharpie thing has never been proven
 
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I have discs over 10 years old that still work.
That being said I wouldn't rely on optical discs nowadays to store things especially with per GB prices as low as they are on HDs. Besides that who likes putting in multiple discs to pull off files? Not me. :)
 
Damnit... I've been putting off ripping the rest of my optical media collection. Some of those discs are 12-13 years old. I hope they still work.
 
it depends on the quality of the media, really.

I have CD's that I burned back in 97-98 that still work great :) likewise, I have CD's from the same period where the top layer/label is starting the flake off.
 
tybert7 said:
Going over an old spindle of burned cds and dvds, I find an interesting result. Most of the discs are compromised.


They were not stored in some exotic location with wildly fluctuating temperatures, they were safe, and over time, they just degrade.

It seems beyond stupid to have an optical disc degrade, to have the format be so pathetic and feckless that its primary purpose FAILS to deliver.

Only hard drives from now on until something more robust comes around, or I can be convinced there are safe discs/formats out there.
Click to expand...

Yup, I've seen most of my backup CDs go bad over the years so I've stopped using them.

Best bet?

Find an old hard drive and just use that. Temporarily hook it up to your PC, backup all your necessary data, then remove it and put it somewhere safe.

CDRs are useless for serious long term storage.
 
Now if I could get the company I work for to understand this :rolleyes: Our corporate documentation states that optical media is the preferred storage medium for patient records that need to be kept for 22 years :eek: I keep telling them that the data is most likely not going to be there if they ever need to retrieve it... but my "higher ups" just wave the corporate policies around without thinking....
 
I've stopped using CD/DVDs for backing up movies and stuff altogether too. It's not that they're unreliable.

It's just that if you're going to back up important data and you expect to have it last at least 5-10 years then you should be using quality media - the expensive stuff like Verbatim/Pioneer/Sony discs. I have DVDs that I've burned 8 years ago on my first ever DVD burner - a Pioneer A04 and I can still read these discs. Then I have stuff that was burned as recent as 2-3 years on cheap Taiyo Yuden discs (that go for $20 for 100DVDS @ 4.2cents per GB) that are just unreadable today.

With hard drives so cheap now (you can find a 1.5TB drive for <=$100, that's 6.6cents per GB) and build a nice RAID-5 array. Sure it's a bit more than cheap DVDs, but I'd rather have a massive multi-terabyte array over racks of discs along with labeling headaches and keeping track of hundreds of discs. Then there's also the speeds: 100+ MB for hard drives compared to 10MB/s for discs.
 
farscapesg1 said:
Now if I could get the company I work for to understand this :rolleyes: Our corporate documentation states that optical media is the preferred storage medium for patient records that need to be kept for 22 years :eek: I keep telling them that the data is most likely not going to be there if they ever need to retrieve it... but my "higher ups" just wave the corporate policies around without thinking....
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If you're using proper archival media, they should be okay, but the ultra cheap 'Ritek' crap discs that everyone uses are lucky to last a year without bit rot.

TY is good, and they do make true archival media, but true 'guaranteed lifetime' archival stuff is expensive.
 
zoobaby said:
Think the life time of a CD is ~ 10 years. So those of you pushing that mark, I'd make backups.
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+1

honestly nothing is lifetime bulletproof, and if the data is truly important, you should make multiple redundant copies on different storage mediums in order to ensure the data is available

there is nothing wrong with CDs or DVDs for backups, and I have both commercially pressed discs and home made discs that are easily over 10 years old that still read fine, the stuff thats actually important is also stored on a hard-drive or two
 
HardwareGuru said:
Do you label your cds and dvds with a regular sharpie marker pen? I use to do that and some of the cds and dvds won't read over time.
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Is it safe to use the Creative Labs brand Sharpie included with my Creative Labs CD burner?

I've found that some CD and DVD drives are much better than others at reading disks. For example, my BenQ DQ-60 (TEAC design) can read a lot of disks that my old NEC ND-2500 and newer Lite-Ons can't, including horrible Great Quality brand DVD-Rs.
 
It depends on the quality of the burner and the quality of the media. The 16x Lite-Ons and 16x Samsungs were known to read discs in horrible shape. They could even do PI/F scanning and jitter tests. I have no idea what's good nowadays since I moved to using hard drives exclusively for archiving (more reliable, easier, faster, cheaper, etc.)

If it's especially important stuff, always make at least two different copies from two different manufacturers/sources. No matter how reliable the reputation a model has, you never know if you're going to get a bad batch. Losing all the data on a 1TB hard drive can't be much fun. ;)
 
Would a harddrive degrade just sitting there? I'm a slob so my dvd's get scratched but drives are getting really big so I was thinking I'd just buy a huge drive stick it in one of my old comps and backup everything to that and then just stick it in a cool corner, not even plugged in. I don't think I've produced a terabyte of data in all my years of work/wasting time with a computer...
 
there is no truly reliable media. hard drives also will suffer from data migration unless they are refreshed every so often. strange to think that our so called permanent media is not that permanent after all
 
Nah, paper will burn up in a fire! What we must work towards doing is etching a bunch of 1's and 0's into high quality metal so that when the time comes we can just manually enter it back into our computer
 
Deadgye said:
Nah, paper will burn up in a fire! What we must work towards doing is etching a bunch of 1's and 0's into high quality metal so that when the time comes we can just manually enter it back into our computer
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Already done. I can't find the site right now, but there's a company that does this. :D
 
A lot of people don't realize just how much variation in quality there is between burners, media, and burning settings.

Hanging around at cdfreaks and similar forums for a while can help.

Anything I really care about is burned at specific speeds, with two specific media types chosen for my burner. It is then PI/PF scanned and a printout taped to the jewel case. (We're talking about truly irreplaceable digital media like family photos). I've never lost a file yet since I started paying attention.

You cannot simply take (cheap burner) and (blanks on sale at Best Buy), burn at (max) and expect reliable results.

If the material is replaceable, I'll still use excellent media but burn at max speed. You also need to be aware that a given brand/packaging of media may not be the same actual discs (media code) from week-to-week. Saying "Verbatims are best" would be pointless, since a "Verbatim" package could end up being any number of media IDs from the best through crap.
 
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This thread got me thinking so I started going through all my backup discs. Most of the stuff I haven't touched in years and will probably never touch again. However, I was having trouble reading data from a good portion of them. These were all on good quality name brand discs. Easy solution was to go buy a hard drive and put all the data on it. I was able to recover all the data. It just took forever to read some of it.
 
This is something I have heard for a number of years.

Because of this thread though I have decided to copy off some of the stuff I want to hold onto that I archived at a point in time where I didn't have enough HDD space.

Now I have a Windows Home Server with file duplication configured and that I also backup to an external HDD periodically, far less chance of loosing it that way but still nice to have the DVD in case but for long term storage, yea I think we are going to be hearing a lot of horror stories.

Most people who ask me about backing up their PC these days, I don't even mention DVDs anymore because with the multi megapixel cameras, video, higher bitrate music libraries etc. 4.7GB just isn't enough and dealing with multiple discs is a royal pain in the butt, plus it is time consuming and inconvenient which means most people will "get around to it" instead of just plugging in their HDD and hitting the go button.

For most people, "backup" is really just a temporary storage medium anyhow since they are preparing for a time when their HDD goes out or they take it to a PC shop that likes to wipe HDDs. This makes a DVD a reasonable backup method if the user can comfortably backup their files but they need to be sure to do this more than once a year. :)

I hope someone can come out with a better archival option that is cost effective because many businesses and home users alike are going to start running into this.
 
I wouldn't rely on just 1 media for backup. I actually have it stored in several places. The HDD, DVD Disk and External HDD.
 
Audiochris said:
good quality name brand discs.
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What mediaIDs? What speed did you burn at? What burner + firmware? Did you do PI/PF scans when you burned them, or just a read-back verify, or neither?

Seriously - I can't stress this enough - media is a minefield. Most of the media "name brands" are simply packagers, and they'll package any number of types of media and rely on their "quality name brand" to sell. You might not be able to tell the difference between "Verbatim Datalife" which are actually PRINCOs and "Verbatim Datalife" which are Taiyo Yuden.

I don't know that it's kept up to date, but in the past I used http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm as a reference for quality by Media ID. You can also find out a lot of info from cdfreaks and other similar forums.

Also, if you don't know EXACTLY what you're buying (and even if you think you do), use a Media ID identification program when you open a new cakebox. I've used http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/ in the past.

As I mentioned in another thread (I think it was photography related) for the last couple of years I've ordered from a commercial media house http://www.blankmedia.ca/ because they typically indicate the exact mediaID in their SKUs and import Taiyo-Yuden media directly. I got really sick of trying to guess whether the "Maxell", "Verbatim" or "TDK" blanks were actually the good ones, the OK ones, or the crappy ones by looking at SKUs, fine print, and the "Made in XXX" to decipher what I was actually buying.

What media type does DVD Identifier say your "quality, name brand media" is?
 
Canon said:
T
Most people who ask me about backing up their PC these days, I don't even mention DVDs anymore because with the multi megapixel cameras, video, higher bitrate music libraries etc. 4.7GB just isn't enough and dealing with multiple discs is a royal pain in the butt, plus it is time consuming and inconvenient which means most people will "get around to it" instead of just plugging in their HDD and hitting the go button.

For most people, "backup" is really just a temporary storage medium anyhow since they are preparing for a time when their HDD goes out or they take it to a PC shop that likes to wipe HDDs. This makes a DVD a reasonable backup method if the user can comfortably backup their files but they need to be sure to do this more than once a year. :)
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Backups and Archives are different things and usually require different approaches.

Archives are irreplaceable data which you need to keep "forever".

Backups are extra copies of data which may or may not be replaceable which do not need to live "forever".

I used NAS, mirroring and a daily tape backup (20 tape rotation) for live data backups, an external disk chassis for OS backups, and optical media (two copies) for archives.

My archives are much, much smaller than my backups. I probably have about 75 unique (not including duplicates) DVDs for archives which are just about all digital photos and video.

At the moment I would trust well-burned optical media with no moving parts for archives more than a mechanical HDD sitting on the shelf or in the safety deposit box despite the obvious capacity/density advantage of the HDD.
 
i use printable TDK disks, they have the white cover on the disk, havent ever had a problem going on... 6-7 years now not being able to read a disk.

i do have disk though that felt the air of Antigua, the salt and started to dissolve, the top silver label.
 
Surly73 said:
Backups and Archives are different things and usually require different approaches.

Archives are irreplaceable data which you need to keep "forever".

Backups are extra copies of data which may or may not be replaceable which do not need to live "forever".
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This was very well put. The only thing that I would add to your post is that there is a new optical media option available. Has anyone else heard of this? Rather than DVD-Rs that are written by making changes to an organic dye, this company says that they make actual physical changes to the optical stack ensuring a much longer ability to store data. These discs do require a special writer. They key is that once the data is on the disc, they can be read by any standard DVD drive. Here is their website:

www.millenniata.com
 
I am using high quality DVDs for archiving right now. I am only using them until blu-ray is cheap enough because blu-ray discs will last a very long time and are scratch resisitant
 
I no longer have optical drives in new systems I build, only an external drive I connect when needed. I use LAN and off-site mirroring of data as well as off-line backups on HDDs. Optical media would just be cumbersome :)
 
bump this post because this weekend I will start moving all of my old cdrs to either harddrives or TDK DVD.

Was hoping DVD would be good enough for irreplaceable data.:(
 
when DVD came out they claimed it would last for 100+ years, then they found out quick that more like 10 years using good media, cause they then took into thought location, temperature and so on.
 
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