Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)
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Verbatim clarified that these discs were advancements. The technical changes resulted in a different appearance and the ability for higher burning speeds, the changed media-ID was due to an adaptation with regard to other Verbatim products. Verbatim had already shipped the first modified media in early 2022. The data security of the new discs is not inferior to that of the old discs: Data should also last 1000 years, according to the manufacturer.
There must be an industry association which licenses the M-Disc trademark and disk identifier? If the Verbatim media is legit, they can be issued a unique, approved disk ID by the M-Disc trademark licensing body.
Edit: list of identifiers, https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli...
Afaicr, the writable optical media market has been race-to-the-bottom since ~2000.
But they're not fake - apparently they got bought out and the new media IDs belong to them.
Verbatim 25GB M-Discs are great. Have an archival copy of my files in addition to my NAS stuff. The important files are often small, so I use regular these smaller capacity M-Discs for them.
Neither my dad nor I knew how writable media like that worked at the time, and I think we both assumed that, assuming they didn't get scratched, they would last forever. Obviously we were wrong.
I am surprised at this, as the CD age highlighted the importance of quality media. At one point you would actually mentally allocate 2-3 cds for any thing you would want to burn to account for frequent issues. Kodak Golds became the bar for quality, I think I still have a bunch of unused ones on a spindle in a box somewhere.
Interestingly enough, I still have a whole lot of burned and unburned CDs, but don't actually have a reader for them these days. It wasn't even something I was aware of, my desktops gave way to laptops, and new ones didn't include an optical media drive, and now I just don't have a cd/dvd reader.
I keep a USB blu-ray drive around because I like to have rips of my physical media, and it seems to read CDs just fine. None of my computers have a CD drive built in anymore.
Still, I don't feel like we came to the conclusion of CDs being archive-grade on our own, someone probably told us that a "CD will last forever" and we just never questioned it.
This is one of the cases that a magneto-optical system like MiniDisc excels at. It's not fast (though, if it had been financially viable for Sony, who knows what it would look like now), but it's far more persistent than CD/DVD-R's, because there's no dye to break down - it's just physics. My audio MiniDiscs are as good today as they were when I recorded them 20 years ago.
It used to be a somewhat common topic. The failure mode is not having enough hardware for copying from medium A to medium B, such that the bandwidth of the system means that by the time you try to copy the last archive to the new media, either the old media has decayed or you’ve already started copying to a new generation of storage because the oldest records in the new medium is already decaying.
And each generation there’s more to copy, soaking up the improvements in read or write time.
The reel-to-reel tapes I was transcribing were literally falling apart as they played one last time. Others suffered from the hydroscopic substrate that made them twist and curl. I didn't know about tape baking back then.
I have a media capture kit that includes 4mm and 8mm video, VHS, reel-to-reel and a bunch of adapters. I pipe all the video into a DVD recorder and also an HDMI to USB adapter so I can capture everything twice with one play.
> https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat...
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M-DISC on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=m-disc&sort=byDate&type=commen...
My understanding is it was something unique for DVDs (which are no longer manufactured) but not much difference anymore for Blu-ray.
[edit] > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967#33595128 BD-R discs using inorganic dyes are durable enough that the M-Disc branding is likely moot
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300GB https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981#39170038
I was relying almost entirely on SSD and USB flash drives, and then I read how temperature-sensitive an SSD might be when left unpowered on the shelf: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data...
I've used DVD+R DL for backups in the past, but it was painfully slow and coaster-prone, even if I tried to use blanks from a particular factory of a particular brand that was said to be more reliable. Also, not enough capacity anymore.
M-Disc BD has the drawback of being Blu-ray, which seems to have gratuitously obnoxious things about it that I don't want to deal with on Linux.
At least 3 copies.
At least 2 different media types.
At least 1 copy off site.
SSDs and flash drives are both NAND flash (albeit of significantly different qualities), so that violates #2.
As for me? I backup onto a local NAS (1 copy) and forget about it (1 media type [HDD], 0 off site). Why? Because impracticality is a fucking hard mistress, that's why. At least I have more than 0 copies, unlike most people.
I don't have one yet (still burning DVDs) but what'd be the obnoxious things to deal with when burning Blu-ray discs on Linux compared to burning DVDs?
It's almost as if one is very comfortable with CDs, and then had to a 6x bump to DVDs, and then a further 6x bump to BDs. And then another 4x bump to 100GB BDs.
Only difference is that the FS you may end up using may not have Joliet/ISO9660 portions but just plain old UDF. You can always write any ISOs you want to smaller discs, or avoid long file names etc. and stay compatible - and if you're building data backups, do your research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
There is some concern because some distributions in the past used to deny/disallow the UDF module https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/115269/centos-6-4-u... but I've never run into any problems using a UDF image, like, ever. Linux support on any 2.4.x kernel and above has been fine.
I have bad experiences with HD and optical, while having positive experiences with Flash. But I've read blog posts claiming exactly the opposite.
Nowadays I have copies on at least 2 Flash and 1 HD for the important but not so voluminous stuff.
They are unreliable for long-term storage without using them. They are guaranteed for only one year of cold storage, because their memory-cell capacitors will slowly discharge.
When the flash memories are new, i.e. they have not been written multiple times, they may hold their data for more than the guaranteed one year, but for archival purposes you should never count on being lucky.
You can extend the storage time on flash memories by reading them periodically, because if they have good firmware for their controllers then they will automatically rewrite any sector that has been read with errors.
These are the only DVDs listed with such a long life. I don't care about RW. Anyone know a brand/model of such DVDs I can still buy today?
(and, yup, I'm one of those still burning DVDs with important data on it and, no, I don't have that much important data and, no, I don't backup only on DVDs)
P.S: speaking of which it's a major PITA but most PC cases brand/models do not offer anymore a slot for a DVD reader/burner. I really dig my "Be Quiet!" tower (Pure Base 500 / military/beige color) but there's no 5"1/4 slot to put a DVD reader in there. It pisses me off so much I may re-assemble my modern PC in an old case : (
I recently moved these disks to a distributed/backed up storage system since I’m low on physical space. All disks read at full speed with no hiccups.
Another alternative is M-Discs if you can find them.
m disks are interesting. can function as dvds and last 1000 years (allegedly). so if you're trying to write something to disk that you want the civilization after ours to be able to read it's a solid choice
Burnt CD-R and DVD-R definitely had a reduced life. CD-RW even worse
I have not been keeping the DVDs in a controlled environment. They have been in a garage in a high humidity region.
I think you could keep them indefinitely in a humidity controlled environment but for the average user they will corrode just like old mirrors do.
I have also had them come right out of the box and have errors. No visible issues. But the thing just will not read in particular places on the movie.
For factory printed discs, bit rot caused data loss in 8 to 10% of the discs. 2 to 3% were a total loss. Those loses were closer to 20-25% for burnable media.
90%+ lived a very comfortable life, climate controlled and protected from UV.
I've got data CDs from 1998 still reading fine. There are CDs and DVDs listed in TFA as having 50 to 100 years of longevity.
How's that 32 GB stick going to do in 50 years if left untouched from now till then?
I've never heard about USB sticks for long term archiving.
> There are CDs and DVDs listed in TFA as having 50 to 100 years of longevity.
Nobody has ever tested that.
I've frozen a floppy disk for one last successful read before.
A quick internet search suggest that a regular 12" record should have a capacity of around ~10-20MB. That is just enough to store one regular JPG photo.
There seem to be print shops that will press records for you at the cost of around ~$100/copy (minimum run 100 copies).
So to back up my ~1,000-ish photos per year I just need a climate controlled warehouse and 99 friend-with-warehouses to distribute backups too!