Optical Media Durability

I've found that optical media like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs corrode over time. Many of the CD-Rs I burned over the last 7 years are unreadable now. Different media seems to degrade at different speeds. Beware of burning a DVD, storing it away for 10 years and trying to read it then.

It's not necessarily as bad as you think: https://blog.dshr.org/2022/08/optical-media-durability-updat...

Yeah, CD/DVD media degrades over time, often on the time span of a decade they become unreadable. They are a bad choice for long term storage.

You could use M-DISCs, which look like traditional CDs nut are made for long-term storage and should be readable much longer than other CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. The optical drives for burning M-DISCs are readily available and not very expensive.

I've never really heard of that being a thing except for ones you burn yourself. Optical media is pretty stable unless (re) writable, so I'm surprised. I've played 20 year old DVDs without issue, fwiw.

Doesn't optical media degrade to the point of no longer being readable after a few years?

Curious why the media is more durable than CD-Rs which are known to degrade after 5-10 years (give or take).

My personal experience has been surprisingly good even with cheap TDK CDRs I burned in the 90s still reading just fine decades later.For especially valuable data you want to preserve for 100+ years, there are "archival quality" discs [0] [1].[0] http://mam-a-store.com/goldcdr.html[1] https://ww

Chose CD/DVD as archival medium was one of the big mistakes I've ever made. Most CDs/DVDs failed just after around 10 years. HDDs seem to be much more reliable.

No, it won't. Some CDs from the early 90ies are not playable anymore because the foil that stores the data is damaged through aging processes. DVDs and hard drives have similar problems and won't last longer than 5-15 years if you are not lucky.