How long do CDRs last?

[Tannin]

Have we had this question before? I once read a claim for 100 years, but it sounds sus. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/32593.html says 2 years for cheap no-names.

 

[timwhit]

I have had cheap no-names last me much longer than 2 years. I have some generic CDs that still work after at least 6 years. Which is incidentally when I first got a CD burner.

 

[Jan Kivar]

Some no-name CD-Rs don't work well at all... Most old medias I have still work, though I have tried/used only a few of very old ones in last two years.

Exposure to direct sunlight kills CD-Rs quickly (leave in car etc.). Scratches are the worst enemy to a regular "home" CD-R. As is dirt/fingerprints etc.

The medias were tested in labs all over world, and results varied from 20 to 100 years. I don't know if the newer discs are tested at all.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[SteveC]

I have cheap generics that are at least 5 years old, and they all still work. I don't think I've had one yet that's become unreadable (aside from scratches).

 

[i]

I had several Sony CDRs go bad back in 2000. They were only a year or two old. If you looked at the underside (i.e. not the label side), you could see strange cloudy patches developing across the CD.

They were kept in a filing cabinet, inside a thoroughly climate-controlled environment. Some of the CDRs were still unused, and still in their shrink-wrap.

 

[Tea]

So, what do you do with important stuff? Buy premium-brand blanks? Keep it in a cool, dark, dry place? Re-copy it every 5 to 10 years? Al of the above?

 

[Mercutio]

I think the situation is much like the one with 1.44MB floppy disks. My ancient ($4 apiece) 1.44MB floppies are still readable, but I can reasonably expect to throw away half of a new box within a month.

By the same token, the oldest CD-Rs I have (1996-ish) are still readable, or were the last time I checked (not much need for that copy of Office 4.3 any more), but some of the stuff I have that's around 6 months old, I'm not expecting to last another 6 months.

I tell my students to expect 3 years of life for burned discs.

The big dealbreaker here, from what I've read, is that the sides of the discs are incompletely closed. Air gets between the layers and ultimately the organic dyes break down (rot, whatever) or the reflective layer tarnishes.

I also have some old (pressed) CDs of 1985 or 87 vintage that are showing signs of tarnish underneath the plastic.

CDs are not forever.

I use Verbatim DatalifePlus for stuff I want to keep, like my movie collection . I keep burned discs in plastic sleeves in sealed cases to minimize exposure to light and air, and I only play/use copies, never originals.

 

[blakerwry]

all of the above...

I personally used to archive to Kodak CD-Rs... but realized that Taiyo Yuden disks (sold under the name Fuji in the USA) are just as good and a hell of a lot cheaper and easy to find... the local mega chain best buy usually has them for ~$5 after rebates for a 50 pack.

It's pretty much universally agreed that taiyo yuden makes the best all around disks for any burner. But ontop of that they are widely available and they are cheap.

Tayio Yuden can also be bought brand name or from "made in Japan" Memorex.



For my LG burners I have found Verbatim data life plus (not to be confused with value life) disks are top quality both in -R and -RW. The only problem is finding the -RW can be kind of tricky.. my local supplier of -RW verbatims only stocks ultra speed disks and most of my -RW drives are high speed only...

 

[i]

Have I mentioned I'm a bit obsessive sometimes?

For important stuff, I write at least two copies, to two different kinds of CD-Rs.

One CD will be a Kodak CD-R Gold Ultima. The other CD-R(s) will be totally different brands and dyes. Furthermore, I buy the blanks from two different, competing distributors. That way it's highly unlikely the CD-Rs will have spent time in the same truck after their entry into the country. (There's always the risk a truck left its trailer parked in southern Texas for a month during the summer - but less so that two did).

 

[jtr1962]

Those 100-year claims are based on testing at high temperature and humidity, and then using an equation to correct for the lifetime at 25°C and normal humidity. While this method may work reasonably well for estimating the life of ICs the correlation doesn't necessarily hold for CDs. I tend to think temperature fluctations are as big a killer as sunlight or humidity. Remember that the layers don't all expand at the same rate. Constant temperature changes will eventually cause the layers to separate, and once air gets in all bets are off. Best bet in my opinion would be to store CDs in a dark, dry, constant temperature environment. A basement(provided it isn't damp) strikes me as an ideal location.

DVDs will probably be worse because they have smaller pits and in some cases more layers.

On a somewhat related note the electronics industry to their surprise discovered a few years ago that the lifetime of white LEDs was not the same 100,000 hour figure that had been well-established for the red, yellow, and green ones. The culprit here was the clear epoxy case. It darkened when exposed to the deep blue light which was used to excite the phosper which actually emitted the white light. After about 6,000 hours brightness was reduced by half. Certainly still better than comparable light bulbs but nowhere near the 100,000 hours originally claimed. At least one manufacturer(Lumileds) has solved the problem and now claims 50,000 hour life.

 

[blakerwry]

kodak blan ks are hard to find now adays.. and they've always been more expensive than jsut about anything else.. if I had really really important data then i'd be going through the pains you are going to.. but most the stuff I burn are just backups (which I have redundant copies of anyway), large files that are infrequently accessed that I don't want taking up disk space (like DIVX movies) or things I'm giving to friends...

Alot of times if I have valuable information I burn it to Cd and then keep a copy of the ISO image on my backup drive.

 

[The JoJo]

I've mostly used Kodak blanks, but the second best has been TDK. Is TDK still ok?

 

[blakerwry]

I've mostly used Kodak blanks, but the second best has been TDK. Is TDK still ok?

havent tried them to compare.. i've found Mitsubishi and Taiyo yuden to be very good... CMC to be about the worst... Ritek to be acceptable... I thought TDK was made by Ritek...

At the moment I only buy mitsubishi made verbatim and taiyo duden from Fuji or Memorex...

I keep my DIVX collection all on memorex because I like their printed side of the CD and it's widely available (although taiyo yuden made memorex is getting harder and harder to find).. K-Mart still stocks them...

 

[NRG = mc²]

TDK uses various factories - sometimes they are Ritek, others they are decent ( I dont quite remember what manufacturer - but I had checked it with CDR Info and it was good. Perhaps TDK themselves, or even Taiyo Yuden.) I believe they were blue on the bottom and made in Japan.

 

[blakerwry]

that would be taiyo yuden.. as far as I know they are the only "made in japan" around.... and they due use a light blue dye vs the pale green or pale blue-green of others...

From what I've heard and seen myself, the darker the dye the better.. blue and even purplish dyes work best...

 

[Handruin]

This topic has quite an important subject when you start to consider long term storage of data... I've thought about this from time to time and my feelings are that evolution helps me to reduce the amount of long term storage I need to keep. Much similar to what Mercutio stated when he said "the last time I checked (...not much need for that copy of Office 4.3 any more)..."

Not only office, but hundreds of titles of software become less important as time goes by. Keeping them around for nostalgic sake is fun, but I don't plan on using windows 95 anytime soon. My important files tend to go through a transitional phase as I move to newer and newer hard drives and computers. As my machines grow, my data moves. I even tend to duplicate the data onto more than one CD without meaning to do so.

I know this doesn't answer the initial question, but in general, but what options do we as consumers have for long term storage?

 

[jtr1962]

I know this doesn't answer the initial question, but in general, but what options do we as consumers have for long term storage?

I wonder about that myself. I personally feel better about optical media than magnetic media, but it seems optical media isn't the long-term solution many thought it was. At least optical disks aren't affected by stray EM fields. Thus far, I've had no problems with any optical media, and most of my CD-Rs and all my CD-RWs are made by CMC Magnetics! After reading this thread I think I'll save my Kodak CD-Rs for very important archival data.

I personally wouldn't trust tape for more than a few years, and hard drives, while fine for quick, daily backups, have a nasty habit of failing almost without warning, at least from what I've read of other people's experiences(I haven't personally haven't had a drive fail-yet).

 

[Howell]

I know this doesn't answer the initial question, but in general, but what options do we as consumers have for long term storage?

With technology progressing as quickly as it does, just make sure your media will last long enough to make it to the next media change over. It's not necessary to have media that will last 50 years if you don't have drives cables and connectors that can use the media. Take one day out of 5 years to rearchive your stuff to the new media.

Yes, I still have a couple 5 1/4" drives; but I haven't plugged them up in so long I don't know it they will work with modern MBs.

 

[Fushigi]

Howell's point is a good one. You need a format that's durable enough to last until the next format becomes mainstream and affordable. At which point, to protect your data you should invest in that format and migrate your data to it. Hey, no one ever said this would be cheap, easy, and permanent.

With DVD burners becoming popular and DVD-ROM drives being commonplace, CDs are going to start losing favor against DVDs as a backup medium because of the data density & relative cost. Now that an 8x DVD burner has been announced/released, I'm going to start to consider getting one.

Tapes are still more reliable than optical IMO. And they certainly have more bits/cubic inch than opticals. They're faster at backing up, too. (I'm referring to real tapes; not those Travan travesties and certainly nothing from Iomega.) But tape technology also has issues to contend with:

- To keep the data on a tape reliable you should read the tape on occasion to 'refresh' the data. Once every couple of years is sufficient.
- Another issue with tapes is the useful longevity of the format. After a few years tape technology has advanced and nobody want to make drives compatible with older media. AIT3 will read/write AIT1, but one of the forthcoming AIT standards changes the physical cartridge size. DLT is effectively dead AFAIK.
- The worst thing going against tape drives, though, is that they are too expensive for the average consumer. Both the drives and the media cost more than equivalent capacity on optical media.

Awhile back I got a free AIT tape drive and a few tapes from my employer & our tape vendor. It's AIT1 so it's not exactly the latest stuff but it's fairly fast and the price was right. We've moved to Ultrium2s on our AS/400s. 200GB/hour backup speed, 200GB uncompressed/cartridge. Of course, they're $7K for each drive (we bought 4) + over $100 per tape (75 tapes) so you pay for what you get.

 

[Tea]

DAT tapes are cheap. (Errrr ... can I say "DAT tape"? Isn't that like saying "digital audio tape tape"? Or "ATM machine"? Where is the Grammar Police when you want him?) But that aside, I have to agree with this:

..... referring to real tapes; not those Travan travesties and certainly nothing from Iomega

Just so. Especially when it comes to anything from Ripmeofmega. Still, at least I know how to dea;l with Zip drives now. (Where did I leave my Heavy Duty Precision Impact Adjustment Tool?

 

[Mercutio]

Tapes are of course utterly impractical for home use. Affordability is getting to be a major concern for small business, too. A $1000 AIT setup is just this side of ridiculous for a small business with other pressing IT needs, like a color laser printer, up to date computers or user training needs.

 

[Fushigi]

Tapes are of course utterly impractical for home use. Affordability is getting to be a major concern for small business, too. A $1000 AIT setup is just this side of ridiculous for a small business with other pressing IT needs, like a color laser printer, up to date computers or user training needs.

I guess printers are more valuable than their data. Sheesh. The cost of the tape drive (or other backup method) should be factored into the cost of the server it'll be used on. Adding $1000 or so to a $5000 server shouldn't be THAT big a deal. ($5000ish is what we pay for a Dell PowerEdge 2650 w/ dual Xeons, 2GB RAM, 4 36GB 10Ks, RAID, W2KServer, 3 year Gold support, etc.)

Yes, tape drives are not practical or economical for consumers. But then how many consumers back up anything at all? How many computer stores try to sell a backup mechanism or tell people to use their CD-RW/DVD-RW drives to back up their data? How many computer retailers tell people their PC's hard drive can fail at all?

 

[Mercutio]

In point of fact, a $5000 server is almost always out of reach for a business with less than ~ 25 employees. There's a reason Dell sells $500 PowerEdge machines as well as $5000 ones.

 

[Mercutio]

While I'm at it, like a lot of "stupid user-ness", a broken workgroup printer is like a 3 alarm fire, while backups that aren't completing or being done at all don't even rate an alarm.

 

[Fushigi]

In point of fact, a $5000 server is almost always out of reach for a business with less than ~ 25 employees. There's a reason Dell sells $500 PowerEdge machines as well as $5000 ones.

Those $500 specials usually include no OS, 40-80GB IDE drive, 128-256MB RAM, Celery or mid-range P4 CPU, built-in NIC, and some basic graphics card. No monitor (same as my 2650s).

The lack of an OS is fine if you want Linux but adding W2K Server will add $799 to the price.

The suitability of the other specs will determine if they're adequate. If you're adding Windows, more RAM would almost definitely be needed.

I suppose my standards are different but I would never, ever, implement a server without protected disk.


I hear you on the backups vs. broken peripherals. Ask 'em if they have car insurance, health insurance, homeowners or renters insurance, and maybe liability insurance. Then ask why they don't care about data insurance when data loss could potentially close the doors of the business.

 

[Howell]

Hey, no one ever said this would be cheap, easy, and permanent.

You might be able to get a bar-code reader to understand the chisel marks on a slab of granite. Oh wait, that not easy.

 

[Buck]

So, what DVD brand discs would you recommend?

 

[blakerwry]

i should also be asking this question.

 

[Mercutio]

I use $.60 Princo -R cheapies for day-to-day burning and $2.20 Verbatim DataLifePlus +Rs for stuff I really want to keep, like the movies I steal from netflix or wantedlist.

Coaster rates for +R discs seem to be lower on my selection of burners, and every +R I've seen burns at its rated speed. I have not found this to be the case with -Rs (where my Princo -R 4x discs burn at 1x on my S*ny drive and 2x on the Optowrites I use at work).

 

[timwhit]

Ritek G04 all around here. I only use -R. You can get these for about $1/disc from Newegg. This is probably the most popular higher quality media you can find.

 

[EdwardK]

I backed up a couple of movies using Ritek DVD-R discs using my Pioneer DVD burner. After a couple of months, I find them totally unreadable even on my Pioneer burner.
My guess is that even Ritek has problems, especially batch problems.

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Handruin]

I've had good results with Memorex 4x dvd-r so far. I've been searching through google and I've found they are some times made by ritek and also by CMC.

 

[Corvair]

So, what DVD brand discs would you recommend?

• VERBATIM .

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Anybody remember some product that was supposed to backup to VCR Tapes? I wonder how this compares in terms of longevity? VCR Tapes last a long time but that could be because the data isn't as close together as it could be?

 

[Mercutio]

That was a gimmick about 15 years ago, I think. I do remember hearing about it. I don't know if it ever got to be more than a novelty, though.
Kinda like those "100x" CD-ROM drives that were around for awhile that used some kind of caching system to go fast.

Hm. Might be an interesting thread there: Computer novelty products.

 

[timwhit]

It was more recent than that. I bet it was within the last 8-9 years. The capacity was pretty low. No more than a few hundred megabytes if I remember correctly, and it was extemely slow as well. I think it used either the serial or parallel port for its connection.

 

[ddrueding]

If you really want to keep data, keep it "live". Keeping it on 2 different hard drive arrays is the only way to guarantee it's survival. Besides the tendency of all removable media to fail, the "stick it in a drawer and count on it being there later" concept just isn't valid. I keep .ISOs of all my important disks, if I were to make a second copy on CD/DVD, that doesn't even double it's chances of survival (as both will age simultaneously).

The only things I use removable media of any kind for are "sneakernet" applications.

 

[timwhit]

If you really want to keep data, keep it "live". Keeping it on 2 different hard drive arrays is the only way to guarantee it's survival. Besides the tendency of all removable media to fail, the "stick it in a drawer and count on it being there later" concept just isn't valid. I keep .ISOs of all my important disks, if I were to make a second copy on CD/DVD, that doesn't even double it's chances of survival (as both will age simultaneously).

The only things I use removable media of any kind for are "sneakernet" applications.

How would you propose storing 200 DVDs worth of data on live storage? That would cost a fortune. Especially when it is redundant.

 

[ddrueding]

How would you propose storing 200 DVDs worth of data on live storage? That would cost a fortune. Especially when it is redundant.

Yes, it would cost a (small) fortune. Do you have 200 DVDs worth of vital data? My current total of vital data is about 600MB. This includes past invoices, bids, quickbooks files, resumes, permit applications, etc. It does not include my 80GB MP3 collection, nor my DVDs. I cannot afford to securely store this data, therefore I'm taking my chances with non-redundant SATA drives for the hard-to-replace stuff, and optical for the replaceable stuff.

I didn't mean to imply that optical storage didn't have it's place, just that putting stuff that is really important on removable media is taking a serous chance that most companies don't appreciate.

 

[timwhit]

How would you propose storing 200 DVDs worth of data on live storage? That would cost a fortune. Especially when it is redundant.

Yes, it would cost a (small) fortune. Do you have 200 DVDs worth of vital data? My current total of vital data is about 600MB. This includes past invoices, bids, quickbooks files, resumes, permit applications, etc. It does not include my 80GB MP3 collection, nor my DVDs. I cannot afford to securely store this data, therefore I'm taking my chances with non-redundant SATA drives for the hard-to-replace stuff, and optical for the replaceable stuff.

I didn't mean to imply that optical storage didn't have it's place, just that putting stuff that is really important on removable media is taking a serous chance that most companies don't appreciate.

My DVDs are just movies, but I don't want to lose them. In the next couple of years if storage prices fall enough (and I make enough money), then I would consider keeping all my DVDs live and just keeping then on DVD for backup purposes.