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Comment by vadimberman | Hacker News Reader

If the physical media are indeed floppies and CDs, these guys will need to take into consideration high share of corrupted data. I know, I know, this is not what the project is about, but without it, the outcome will be more theoretical than practical.

I remember having trying to read a decade-old stash of floppies a few years ago. Too many were unusable. CDs are much better but also relatively unreliable. My USB drives fared much better, even the 64 Mb one with the kangaroo logo still works.

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The need to digitize and preserve media is a problem libraries are well aware of. In addition to a real need to migrate floppies and CDs to newer media, there's also an urgent need to move substantially older and one-of-a-kind media (i.e., 8mm film reels, LPs; think rare interviews with celebrities and luminaries from the 30s and 40s).

For digital media in particular, the Internet Archive is pretty zealously ripping older media [1].

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/785zmx/jason-scot...

[edit] A few interesting examples of the sorts of problems that preservationists encounter in dealing with pre-digital formats can be seen here: https://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/program/05fall/physic...

I haven't seen much discussion about how 20+ year-old CDs are doing. IIRC about half of my self-burned CDs have failed after about 10 years. I wonder what the situation is with factory-stamped -data- CDs. (I have yet to -hear- a problem with my 30+ y.o. music CDs, but I suspect that some aren't 100%.)

There are some albums we have lost because of the disk rot problem. If well made CDs are lasting pretty well. But remember some applications have had doubts about how well paper lasts.

This is why DNA storage is exciting. Barring a civilization reset catastrophe we will have a need to read DNA and improve the process for the long term future. Also in the right environment it has nice self-healing features.

But what happens if that catchy pop song turns out to be truly infectious when coded into DNA? It's the end of the world as we know it.

This is anecdotal, but in my retrocomputing adventures I use a lot of factory pressed CD-ROMs from ~1993-2000 and I have yet to see one fail to read purely due to age.

Burned CD's are a lot worse. How much worse depends a lot on quality and type of disc, in my experience. If you cheaped out on CD-R's by buying the no-name 50 pack spindles back in the early 00's, those will likely all be unreadable now. The fancy gold Kodaks might have survived, though.

I also collect music CD's and it's getting to be a problem that there's a lot of obscure music (demos, live recordings, etc) that only exists on CD-R, and in very limited quantities. I do have rare demos by local bands etc. that have started skipping just because of the CD-R media aging.

Slightly off-topic (but not much) and as a single data point, IMHO a part of the issue with old "burned" CD's is not only the CD but rather the "new" readers (and their speed).

I still have a very old 1x SCSI CD drive (the kind that not many people will remember, using a caddy-cartridge for the CD) on a computer dedicated to "recover" old CD's and the success rate is much higher than on modern CD/DVD readers. I would say 9 out of 10 with the SCSI drive vs. 6/10 on a modern CD/DVD drive.

Very good point.

I'm always surprised when people talk about the unreliability of floppies. I still have my stash of Atari ST games from the early 90s and play them on a real machine regularly and I haven't had a single failure. Perhaps the lower density of 720k floppies makes them less prone to corruption, or perhaps I've just been lucky and stored them well.

Late 90s floppies and drives were definitely not as good as early 90s and 80s floppies.

1.44M floppies are easily the worst of the common formats when it comes to reliability. Even back when you bought them new in stores they were bad, and now they are very bad.

Double-density 3,5" media like the disks for your ST are much better, and both 360K and 1.2M 5,25" types have proven quite resilient in comparison. I play a lot with retro computers in my spare time and anecdotally I find that a random 5,25" 360K disk from 1985 is much more likely to be readable than a 1.44M one from 1995.

1.44MB floppies wernt particularly bad in design, but many people remeber them from the tail end of the format, where reputable brands left the market and only the crap was left over, and floppies from that era truely did suck.

Older USB drives use SLC flash, which is definitely more reliable than the MLC+ encountered today. (The downside is lower capacity; made slightly less bad by the fact that they were actual binary sizes --- I have a 16MB(!) drive that still works, and has exactly 16,777,216 bytes of user-accessible sectors.)

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