vinceJan 3, 2023

PSA: take some time in 2023 to back up your/your family's CD-Rs (and other recordable media) full of memories you threw into storage 10+ years ago; there's a decent chance they've started to rot!

the tenuously thin layer of dyes/adhesives holding the data *will* break down over time, rapidly so if their environment is uncontrolled, the surface was previously nicked/contaminated, or they were cheap ones to begin with

Show thread🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑Jan 5, 2023
@0x56 The US government did a thorough evaluation of an alternate optical media, M-DISC, which uses different physical properties than optical dye media, and found that it has much better longevity (many decades). The M-DISC BD-R costs a lot more than cheap BD-R, but can be read and written on standard drives.
Show threadvinceJan 5, 2023
@brouhaha yeah, i'm considering a follow up long form post/resource of some sort, because the info floating around is spread out, wildly inconsistent, not particularly actionable, and comprises far more opinions than facts. i'm with you on M-DISC however, and ordered a small pile yesterday
Show thread🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑
@0x56 Some vendors claim over 1000 years for M-DISC. Based on the DoD testing (accelerated aging etc.), it seems like over 100 is believable.
Some cheap dye-based seem to not last even 5 years. I have some high quality "archival" dye based CD-R that have survived with no hard errors for over 20 years.
Jan 5, 2023 at 5:55pmWeb
Show threadvinceJan 5, 2023
@brouhaha i missed this one earlier, were the CD-Rs Taiyo Yuden or something else? i grabbed a spool of (hopefully legit) pre-2015 NOS CD-R/DVD-R to do some testing and comparing of drives, and to rewrite some of the rotting discs for use rather than archiving over the next decade or so