On 11/4/23 15:26, gene heskett wrote:
On 11/4/23 17:38, David Christensen wrote:
In any case, burn your most valuable data to optical discs regularly.
Not great advice unless you lock the resultant dvd away from all room
lighting. I have 3 100 disk spindles of dvd's bought years ago, that are
no longer recognized in any of the 4 or 5 dvd writers I have, but one
box of rewritables about the same age, stored n a light tight cardboard
box, will likely outlast me. Some of them have been wiped and reused
several times. Those on a spindle, with a clear dust cover letting the
light into the edges of the stack of disks?? Flaky in 5 years, gone w/o
a trace in 10, the drives don't see them at all. They do spin up for a
minute trying, reseeking and re-reading but there is nothing readable to
tell the drive what this disk needs in order to be written to, left in
the disk starter track at the center of the disk.
Lesson learnt, do not use optical media for long term storage unless
stored in tin boxes like AOL gave away billions of 20 years or more ago.
I have been burning archive DVD-R discs for ~14 years and storing them
in a drawer (e.g. darkness). I checked the oldest just now and it reads
okay.
I have heard of CD discs disintegrating if the lacquer is scratched:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
I have heard that RW media has a shorter lifespan than R media.
Does anyone have experience with M-Disc media?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
David
