[HN Gopher] Optical Disc Data Rot: Burned CDs going bad
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Optical Disc Data Rot: Burned CDs going bad
Author : walterbell
Score : 39 points
Date : 2020-07-28 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.howtogeek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.howtogeek.com)
| euix wrote:
| Man I used to burn so many cds back in the day. I remember when I
| was kid and the first cd-recorders came out, they cost something
| like 2000 dollars and burnt cds at 1x speed. It would take hours
| to burn a cd and sometimes they would turn out as duds. The blank
| discs only held 650 MB (which was quite a bit back then) and were
| also expensive.
|
| There was also a special type of blank disc, the re-writable
| blank disc which was something like 10 bucks a pop at future
| shop.
|
| I had a enterprising career in school at one point burning shared
| music mp3s that I pulled from Napster and selling them to
| friends.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Were you selling Metallica by chance
| Grazester wrote:
| I dont know how my cheap burnt CD's from the early 2000's are
| still fine but some of my pressed CD's are suffering from Disc
| rot!
| daveslash wrote:
| How common is Disc Rot for pressed CD's?
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I regularly buy 2nd hand audio CDs as old as the 80's and
| never had a bad one
| caseyohara wrote:
| Probably survivorship bias as the only old CDs for sale
| today are in good shape
| lb1lf wrote:
| -Still only anecdata, but I've been buying lots of music
| on CD since the late eighties, the oldest I know of was
| pressed in late 1983 sometime. (Which is only a year or
| so after the introduction of the CD anyway)
|
| In sum, some 3,800 CDs. I ripped them all a couple of
| years ago - I had problems with a handful, but EAC
| eventually got them all to disk. I examined the
| troublesome ones, but no (visual) signs of disc rot.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It depends on the factory, the discs and the storage. I don't
| often hear of audio CDs rotting but equally I don't often
| hear of people still using audio CDs in any large quantities.
| However I do hear of people buying retro games for old CD
| systems like the Sega Saturn and how many of those games are
| suffering from rot.
|
| I'm lucky that I've not suffered any rot yet but it's only a
| matter of time for me because I don't store them properly
| either.
| Lammy wrote:
| Much more common is top/label-side damage of the reflective
| substrate. The bottom is protected but the top isn't!
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I recently bought roughly 100 CD-ROMs (~$650) from eBay of
| mid to late 90's Macintosh games and 3 of them were rotting
| (all from the outer edge, the reflectivity was lost in these
| spots) but still mostly readable. They were from roughly 20
| different sellers in the US and Europe.
| gitowiec wrote:
| At the beginning of current year I dumped my data which I have
| written to CDs in years 1997-99. The CD where dark green or blue,
| one or two were golden. All this disks were written with 1x or 2x
| speed. Then I had access to the Yamaha CDR102 burner which was
| SCSI. Burning disks then was a fragile process involving a lot of
| mumbling prayers. I dumped to harddrive about 100 disks... it was
| all MP3 and AVI files. One disk had a hole in its reflecting
| layer the size of cross-section of a matchstick, nevertheless I
| could read whole disk. I don't think I will throw away these
| disks. I will just put them in my basement. Who knows how long
| that 2.5 inch harddrive will be in working conditions :)
| tomxor wrote:
| > The CD where dark green or blue, one or two were golden
|
| For some reason this image just brought back a whole load of
| memories for me. Some of the first of these I encountered were
| previews of my Dad's music he would send me on those ever so
| dark green discs.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Anybody know how BDs fare?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Many BD-R's ought to fare quite well wrt. archival, with a
| better-behaving substrate than CD-R or DVD-R. You may want to
| look for more detailed info to ensure that this applies to your
| disks, though,
| toolslive wrote:
| vinyl records are having their revenge.
| gruez wrote:
| Isn't that trading one failure mode for another? While vinyl
| records won't rot over time, they do wear down, and thus the
| sound quality deteriorates each time you play it.
| korethr wrote:
| A thought occurred to me on a recovery method while reading this
| article: If you had a disc that was marginal, where it might or
| might not read correctly depending on the phase of the moon,
| would it be possible to do something like take multiple raw
| images of the disc, perhaps using multiple different drives, and
| collectively use the images so captured to isolate out the bad
| parts and splice together a valid image file?
|
| Or am I failing to grok the degree to which It's Complicated?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| When I record to DVDs, I always add error correction using
| dvdisaster.[1]
|
| In addition, I sometimes have par2 files[2] on the DVD as well,
| though it's probably better to just have additional dvdisaster
| ECC instead.
|
| It's a good idea to periodically go through all your old backups
| and transfer them to new media, or at least make sure the old
| media still works and start recovery on them right away if they
| don't.
|
| [1] - http://dvdisaster.net/
|
| [2] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline
| sitkack wrote:
| I have had good use of FEC for archival purposes, plenty of
| testing but I haven't had to use it in anger.
|
| This isn't the same tool I used, but it is derived from it,
| https://github.com/randombit/fecpp
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'm surprised there's nothing about storage conditions.
|
| Is it the plastic or the metals breaking down? If it's plastic,
| humidity probably has a bigger impact.
|
| Lower temps are almost always better. Freezer is good. Hard to
| say if an oxygen absorber is helpful.
|
| Or could sparge your container with nitrogen.
| chenxiaolong wrote:
| I've been meaning to try M-DISCs [0] after I found out that my BD
| drive supports burning them. Apparently, they last longer than
| normal discs because the drives burn "a permanent hole in the
| material, rather than changing the color of a dye".
|
| I don't use optical discs much anymore, but I still like the idea
| of archiving things like family pictures on read-only media once
| in a while.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
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(page generated 2020-07-28 23:00 UTC)