I no longer trust optical media for storage

I have had a lot of discs go bad but then again I had a habit for a long time of buying the cheapest spindles I could find. Most of the discs I burned using quality media have stood the test of time.
 
i thought memorex actually used some really cheap disks according to cdfreaks a sometime ago when i checked them out.
 
Ifcourse you could make multiple copies of CDs and DVDs, and store them in multiple locations, such as a safe deposit box, your grandma's house, a storage shack, a PO BOX, or any other trusted location that you can get to.
HDDs do fail as well. I just dont know about those mini-HDDs that go for $99/500gb. Yes, they are small, but moving parts fail more often than burned media such as an optical disc. I mean your drive might fail sooner.
In fact, do the math, it is more costly to get a 500gb HD than saving unto DVDs as cost per GB is more.
 
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I've had problems like that. CD's of pictures, data over time (5 years+) they just wont read, or have error copying back to my computer. I went with external HDD's.
 
I have had high quality DVD and CD media last only a couple years and I have had cheap media last a decade. It is really too hit or miss for me to trust current optical media past a couple years imo. Been slowly moving to flash myself. It costs more and it is not perfect, but it is the more durable than CD/DVD and head and platter hard drives.
 
Isn't storing them out of the light #1. After all they are designed to react to absorbing heat from a light beam.
 
maleficarus said:
For my discs I use Memorex. Can't go wrong with them.
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If you bought them at a Best Buy like place, they aren't good. You're just lucky until the inevitable time comes. Memorex is usually crap.

Bottom line - buy 8x Taiyo Yuden or good Verbatim. No need to even entertain any other brand. The best place which sells genuine TY or Verbatim media is rima.com

Burn at half rated speed, or no more than 8x for DVD-R media. No more than 32x for CD-R media, regardless of rating. For important things, I usually do 4x on DVD-R and 8-16x on CD-R, assuming the drive supports CLV up to 16x.

/thread
 
Am I the only person who doesn't burn over 2x? Heh, I don't even go over 1x for dvds. Stuff that I've burned probably 3-4 years ago still works; I'd like to cite longer longevity but I never had to burn anything off before that.
 
Flash drives do sound like a really smart alternative but price wise I can't afford it, I have tons of data I need to preserve.
 
Oranuro said:
Flash drives do sound like a really smart alternative but price wise I can't afford it, I have tons of data I need to preserve.
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Flash can only store data for 1-10 years (current MLC to SLC Flash). After that the data on it starts evaporating due to electron loss.

Magnetic media (HDD, tape) is used as archive medium at large businesses and such for a reason :)
 
I have found that some of my old burns sure do read slow. They work, if the coating hasn't chipped off, but read DARN slow.
 
apertur3 said:
I have found that some of my old burns sure do read slow. They work, if the coating hasn't chipped off, but read DARN slow.
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Optical media doesn't use a single track of data, but each data track is duplicated a few times, together with error correction bits. This allows the data to be read even if some of the tracks have been damaged for some reason. This error-recovery does have significant overhead, so reading will slow down accordingly :)

Most non-PC CD players do not have this error correction built into it, though, so they'll hang or skip if they encounter a bad section.
 
Oranuro said:
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.:(
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As I've said "TDK DVD" can mean several media types. There's good TDK, and crap TDK, and they both look the same from the outside.

Check your media types against the quality reference I posted earlier before putting all of your eggs in that basket. TDK cake boxes that Costco was selling a couple of years ago were total crap.

Don't burn at max speed and do a PI/PF scan, not just a verify, if the data is really important to you.
 
Would a harddrive degrade just sitting there?
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I would not trust leaving a hard drive on the shelf for 5 years only because the motor may not spin up.
 
BTW are most talking about DVD+/-R or DVR+/-RW. I consider RW to be a lot more fragile than write once media.
 
just out of curiosity, what type of CD material do the record companies use?

some of my cd's are reaching 15-18 years old, but they still play fine

same with some of my dvd's that are 10 years old
 
makmatsu said:
just out of curiosity, what type of CD material do the record companies use?

some of my cd's are reaching 15-18 years old, but they still play fine

same with some of my dvd's that are 10 years old
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Non-recordable CDs aren't burned, but pressed. This means that a non-organic material has the data pressed directly into it. It's very stable and not nearly as sensitive to temperature and UV as organic dye recordables.
 
Elledan said:
Non-recordable CDs aren't burned, but pressed. This means that a non-organic material has the data pressed directly into it. It's very stable and not nearly as sensitive to temperature and UV as organic dye recordables.
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thanks
 
Elledan said:
Non-recordable CDs aren't burned, but pressed. This means that a non-organic material has the data pressed directly into it. It's very stable and not nearly as sensitive to temperature and UV as organic dye recordables.
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Yep, and last time I read anything about it, CD's had an average life expectancy in the 75 year range with proper care and usage.
 
drescherjm said:
BTW are most talking about DVD+/-R or DVR+/-RW. I consider RW to be a lot more fragile than write once media.
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I'm exclusively talking about DVD +- R. RWs have very low contrast ratios etc... to begin with and aren't in the same league for retention.
 
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