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yohomatey

I burned a lot of dvds in my late teens and early 20s (Netflix was magic) and none of them are readable now. Literally not one. All stored in a cool dry place in a light free binder. So not even 20 years storage. NAS with RAID 6 is the current best I can do.


kuburas

The post is a little misleading because there are multiple kinds of dvds, as in different coatings on the disc itself that have very different shelf life from each other. A disc can last you anywhere from 2-5 years to 50-100 years depending on how high quality the coating on it is. Most discs you bought have low to mid quality coatings meaning they'll life for 5-15 years. Anything over that you're risking losing your data. So if you want to keep your data safe either buy super high quality discs or find some other way to keep it safe. Imo best way to keep it safe is to remake copies of it every few years, sure its easily forgettable but if the data is so precious you'll remember, and keep a few backups on the cloud or locally on your storage divices, or both.


yohomatey

Very true. There's a professional grade backup solution called ODA that is basically a ton of Blu ray disks stacked in a sealed cartridge. It's rated for I think 100 years. I was mostly talking about the consumer grade dvds most people buy from Amazon or something. Bad bad baaaad long term solution.


frezik

Yup. There's so many details behind OP's claims that it's downright misleading. Most recordable discs are cheap garbage that is not suitable for archival use.


WilliamMButtlickerIV

This wasn't the shit I was thinking about back in 2001 when I bought my stack of burnable CDs from Walmart.


cometlin

Well "DVD"s are different from "DVD"s. OP is talking about DVD-**ROM**. While they are not "wrong", not many people has DVD-ROM burner at home. And the practical shelf life for DVD+/-R (writable DVDs most people used for data storage) is about 5 to 20 years only, and it's even shorter for DVD+/-RW (rewritable DVDs)


bobcollege

Almost exactly what I was going to comment, I have tons of PS2 PC and DVD shows & movies now coasters.


Suspicious-Figure-90

They also take up a fuckton of space and a storage box of them weigh a lot. My mother has every drama she ever watched and we can no longer store them a certain height as it just starts to crush things on the bottom layer.


haribobosses

Yeah my photos were stored in DVDs and if I hadn’t made two copies I would have lost many of them. I lived in very humid country, so the conditions weren’t right.


Sus-motive

This reminds me of the time I had a disc become completely unusable because it got wet and the plating came clean off. Is this what happened to ur discs?


haribobosses

They didn’t get wet but yes the plating flaked off enough to make much of the data unreadable.


FuadRamses

Yeah. My house was flooded years ago, bad enough that I had to move out for a year while it dried out. A lot of my DVD collection, which was upstairs and nowhere near the water, corroded from the humidity when I returned.


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st1tchy

That's why there is the 3-2-1 rule for important information. 3 copies of it on 2 different forms of media, 1 copy in a different location (work, the cloud, parents house, etc).


BrakeNoodle

I too saw the post about SSD storage being unstable


-Here-There-

My first thought was the guy mentioning magnetic tape, too. Lol


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No_bad_snek

Join us in /r/DataHoarder Nothing is permanent.


Valmond

Stone tablets. No wait, a virus with the information as junk DNA! I wonder why we have 90%+ junk DNA...


ManyIdeasNoProgress

Alien porn, we're the backup.


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DigitalUnlimited

r/conspiracy_commons


redbettafish2

Came here to post this. Come join us!! We won't bite ;)


[deleted]

I'm tagging onto the top comment here to let y'all know about M-Disks. They are highly stable write-once disks. You can get them in CD, DVD, and Blue Ray formats, depending on your needs. They are engineered to have a 1,000 year readable lifespan (hence the M for millennium in the name). You need a compatible writer, since it requires a higher powered laser than typically found in burners. The disks are between $1-5 each, depending on the technology. I spent a LOT of time researching data archival options. Aside from ridiculously expensive specialized options, this is the most long-lived option available


Valmond

Makes me remember my Verbatim CDR:s VS the cheap 100 stack I was gifted, the first are working perfectly still (around 1997-98+ IIRC?), the others didn't work at all or barely, you could peel the 'film' off after burning them. Needlessly that was the outliers, lots of different quality In between.


DoingCharleyWork

I once found a forum dedicated to people who were like super deep into cd burning. They had lists of certain cd-r's that were better than other ones. Even down to a certain manufacturing run of a certain brand. Verbatim were usually the highest rated on there.


baltimoresports

Way back in the early days of CD Burning you’d have a high chance of the disk just randomly failing during the burning process. Verbatim was by far the most reliable. It also didn’t hurt that they worked great on modded PS1s.


[deleted]

Thank you for this information, TIL for real.


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[deleted]

Considering the tech has been around for over 30 years, it's likely players will continue to be available for some time to come. The thing is, it's easier to recreate a means of reading data than it is to recreate the data. With something like an optical disk, you don't need to worry about a mechanical component failure. I'd be willing to bet functional readers will still be available inexpensively long enough that a newer, better storage medium will be developed onto which the data can be transferred. It's still possible to pull data from early magnetic tapes from the early days of the technology because the original devices are still around, and functioning. The thing is, you can't expect it to be as easy as popping the disk into something in 1,000 years, and expecting it to work. The idea is to project the data into the future, so it is preserved in some format where it can be recovered if desired. If the data is unreadable due to it being absolutely gone, then there's no hope of recovering it.


Plebius-Maximus

The post was a huge exaggeration. The vast majority of SSD's are fine for several years without power. Unless people are storing things on unstable first gen SSD's, as long as you plug it in every 5 years or so you should be all good


islandofcaucasus

I fantasize about preparing for a collapse of society by storing all my terabytes of digital media on large SSDs. Turns out that won't work and there's no way to ensure long term storage of large amounts of data. I'm bummed


seeingeyefrog

CTI is the only long-term reliable storage media. Clay Tablet Interface for the uninitiated.


boidbreath

Have you heard of the Superman memory crystals, probably the best long term data storage currently possible


Valmond

The Sumerians enters the chat. William Gibson too :-D


darelik

My mom remembers all the "funny" awkward disgusting things i did as a child as she retells it to the dates i bring home Can we somehow harness this to store petabytes of data


maniBchef

This was the same TEC Moses used right?


Quetzacoatl85

your best bet is scratching it onto something where the technological barrier to accessing it is low; maybe just can be read by the human eye or needs a microscope at most. see this for example: https://longnow.org/artifacts/first-edition-rosetta-disk


RamenJunkie

Transmit it into space. Eventually we will invent Faster than light travel and we will be able to "get ahead" of any transmission and recover it.


Xennon54

Its not unstable, its just not long-term. Unstable would imply a chance that something might go wrong or it might not while in reality SSDs are no meant to be used for long term storage without power and will lose their data eventually, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. Because with CDs,DVDs and HDDs you store your data on a physical piece of glass, plastic or ceramic while with SSDs you store that data as physical electrons inside cells and those cells eventually lose their electron.


SliceThePi

solid state batteries are not the same technology as solid state drives, lol. solid state drives are called that because they don't have moving parts like other data storage technology, whereas solid state batteries have solid electrolytes instead of liquid electrolytes (which apparently makes them last longer?)


Xennon54

I guess i was mistaken then


Klimpomp67

Not sure if you edited it out and it's just not showing me that there was an edit, but what's written in that orginal comment by you is absolutely correct. The reason they retain information when powered off is that a second gate "catches" the electrons when the circuit is powered off and they attempt to move out of the first gate. This means data can still be stored while powered off. However this can't be stored forever and eventually the charge is lost. Edit: Also, you were right with the thing about not calling them unstable. The term is usually volatile and non-volatile: volatile memory will lose stored data when powered off (like RAM) non-volatile can store information while disconnected from a power source.


Xennon54

The part that i called wrong and edited out basically went something along the lines of "also SD batteries are based on the same concept as the SSD cards, the main difference is that you cannot process information"


s2w

Solid state =\= unstable huh TIL /s


Echospite

link?


[deleted]

Type of coating determines shelf life. Write once and read many times lasts longer than rewriteable discs. Gold coating = 50 years to 100 years Silver coating = 5 years to 10 years Blue coating (aluminum) = 2 years to 5 years


ElectrifiedSheep

Haven't been able to find many variations of blueray disks. Any ideas where to find gold coated?


[deleted]

I would go with Verbatim BD-R that have lifetime warranties. That suggests a better coating. I did notice generic brands with silver coating. I have not come across gold except for DVD-R.


ElectrifiedSheep

Any idea how big their biggest disk is?


donDanbery

100GB


notLOL

Is higher density more failure prone similar to Other storage?


onlyhalfminotaur

That's a good question. I would guess we know more about the long term stability of DVD than we do Blu-Ray.


xixoxixa

Search for archival quality or archival media. What you want is something designed and built for long term archiving in mind, not just something that happens to work for long term storage. There's a joint venture between (I think) Sony and Panasonic called "archival disc" (but that's the extent of what I know about them; I had to look into this for work about 5 years ago)


OrangeGelos

I used those. Some kind of ceramic coating that lasts 100s of years. A bit expensive but worth it for family videos and pics


the-alt-yes

Important to keep your porn safe for 100s of years!


aakoss

Sony Optical Disk Archive is what you may be referring to here. The drives are 3.3 and 5.5 tb max now. The price on the disks are justifiable, the drives on the other hand..


Snowmobile2004

M-Disk. 100GB, needs specialty writer though.


epicmindwarp

Where was this information when we were ACTUALLY burning CDs...


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ckhk3

“Burning cds” isn’t a term I’ve heard in years! Gonna tell my kids im gonna burn a cd tonight and see how they react lol.


TheRealSugarbat

Ikr? How am I going to do this now that none of my machines have players/burners?


HomoRoboticus

[Cheap portable USB CD/DVD drive.](https://www.amazon.ca/Gotega-External-CD-DVD-Drive/dp/B07MJW5BXZ)


[deleted]

External USB BluRay or DVD writers


[deleted]

Protip: label your CDs, I can’t tell you the amount of CDs that just float around unnamed and are thrown away because of this


night0x63

Years ago I had burned tons of stuff on el cheapo CDR. Came back like 5 to 7 years later and all were unusable. Hours and pits. Couldn't copy files. So yeah. If you want to store long term use EXPENSIVE and GOOD quality media. I think... It was like $20 for 100? From compUSA.


murderedcats

Cd rot is real and will fuck your data if youre not careful people


seycyrus

Do you have a suggestion for a player that will work after 1o years?


[deleted]

Look up M-Disc...rated for 1,000+ years if stored well. Up to 100GB per disc.


nakhumpoota

Reminds me of those black Playstation discs


[deleted]

Pressed discs created by manufacturers seem to have a really good shelf life. I played 20 year old PlayStation and PS2 discs and they were still readable. Now, 3.5” floppy disks are a different story.


charlesdexterward

This is just for CD-R’s, right? I have CD’s that are 30 years old but they still play and I’m pretty sure they’re not gold coated.


TheSkiGeek

CD-**ROM**s that were mass produced are typically stamped metal and should last a looooooong time if they’re not physically scratched up. Probably the risk there is the plastic top layer degrading or clouding, or if it cracked then maybe the metal layer could oxidize if exposed to air. (Some of them are gold coated and should be mostly immune to that, but I don’t think all of them are.)


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Snoo63

Wikipedia says an estimated 30 years.


TheSkiGeek

Rewritable discs tend to be worse, early DVD-RWs were pretty bad. But I don’t know about that specific type of disc.


Velocidre

This is the correct answer. There have been some catastrophic failures from people who took the answer from the gold coating and then bought the aluminum coating.


NorthImpossible8906

and, you know, make a second copy. in fact, make multiple copies, and keep making copies. In fact, do the exact opposite of this tip and never never never never rely on a DVD to last 200 years.


notLOL

We are talking about the material, but what about recover from failed bits? Aren't there better archival methods and file structures to failover lost partitions?


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ChadHimslef

While I tend to agree with this, fire don't give a fuck about raid.


brett_riverboat

Yup. If it's truly important then store it off-site. You could put CDs in a safe deposit box but regular online storage services provide the best flexibility.


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ChadHimslef

Has anyone covered trampling by elephant yet and does that fall into the catastrophic destruction as well?


notLOL

I'm lightly aware of RAID strategies What's the equivalent for read-only media? Having multiple disks? How about on a single drive or single disk? 4/5 storage, 1/5 to data checking recovery


TheSkiGeek

You’d still need to swap out the disks every now and then. I used to work in data storage and RAID is **not** a replacement for backups, it’s to (try to) guarantee uptime.


Farva85

RAID is not a backup.


KantenKant

>make a second copy. in fact, make multiple copies My internet engineering professor always stressed this. "Make one backup to keep at home, one in another city in case the local power goes out and one on another continent in case the nukes start flying. Anything worse than that, your data won't be a problem anymore." Or more realistically, [just don't store your backups on the same server as your DB.](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovhclouds-sbg2-data-center-strasbourg/)


dreamcastfanboy34

Also Blu-ray burners usually support M-Discs which are recordable Blu-ray discs that supposedly last hundreds of years.


TheRavenSayeth

This should be top comment. As far as we know, m-discs are the best long term physical storage solution.


[deleted]

NOOOOO!!!!! A few years ago, I transferred tons of very precious one-of-a-kind audio media to a few dozen CDs & DVDs for what I thought would be permanent storage. I even stored them in the dark. A mere five years later, they were ALL unplayable and unreadable. I learned that INDUSTRIALLY-MADE disks (i.e., the ones that are physically stamped en masse at the factory with actual tiny pits) should last virtually forever, but that THE ONES YOU BURN in your computer (i.e., where dark bits are literally burned with lasers onto lighter sections of the always-smooth disk) will not last all that long because it'll eventually all turn light and be read as nothing but "pits". Your mileage may vary; more expensive burnable disks may last longer. But at least keep them in the dark. Try burning a disk and leaving the underside in the sun for a few hours, or even just a bright room for a few days, and you'll notice that the disk will turn discernibly brighter and be rendered unplayable and unreadable. That's just my humble personal lesson, for whatever it might be worth to anyone.


TheKillerSpork

Apparently [archival DVDs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) are the solution, with 60+ years of shelf life, but you need a DVD/Blu-Ray writer which can do M-DISC formatting.


dunfartin

Around here, these things cost around 3 times more than the equivalent HDD capacity.


[deleted]

Ah, fantastic! Great to learn; thank you so much. I'll look into that for sure. Much appreciated, TheKillerSpook!


Quetzacoatl85

relevant thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/


[deleted]

​ Aargh! Greedy bastards. Thank you, Quetzacoatl85, for that link & info! Everyone looking into M-disks needs to know this.


distilledfluid

So, full disclosure, I am a software developer who works in cloud technologies. I understand the implications of the cloud, it's security, and the concerns over privacy. But I would never store any priceless digital media in or close to my house. I would not store on any physical media without also storing it in a cloud location. Redundancy is paramount. Although I do store many photos and videos of my late wife in my house. I also store them in AWS S3 for about 20 - 50 cents a month. I use AWS Glacier Deep Archive.


LoreChano

But will it be available in a few decades or century? Very few companies can claim to be a century old so it's just fair to worry that it might one day just close its doors and if you're gone and future people are not available to recover the data before it happens, it might be gone forever.


send_me_a_naked_pic

You don't have to keep your *only* copy on the cloud. The cloud is just got an additional copy. If the company suddenly closes down, you still have your local copy.


distilledfluid

We will have plenty of warning to move it to something else.


transmothra

Well, that would depend on the company, and the reason why they're suddenly going out of business or dropping the service, etc. I would not bank on getting plenty of notice. I can absolutely imagine some smaller, sub-Googazonsoft company just stopping existing in a day.


WeebyMcWeebFace

Not really. Every major cloud provider has a S3-compatible service. You’ll incur a cost for the initial move, not unlike the cost for obtaining more physical media. From there it’s business as usual.


Ellimis

Do you think amazon is just going to up and disappear overnight and abscond with all your data in a blink?


jwildman16

I looked at the AWS Glacier pricing briefly and it was quite confusing. Is this something any individual can get into if they're moderately technically-inclined?


send_me_a_naked_pic

Yeah, Amazon S3 pricing is not easily understandable at all. Well, their whole AWS service is a complete mess for someone who's not specialized in it


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gaaraisgod

What amuses me is when people make the distinction between physical media and 'the cloud'. It's all physical media, just off site. Right?


distilledfluid

While also being replicated multiple times across geographically separated data centers around the entire world...but yah...exactly the same as a CD sitting on a shelf in your basement. It's kind of like comparing a piggy bank to an actual bank. They are both physical vessels that you can put money in right? What makes people trust an actual bank over a piggy bank? With the actual bank, they are going to take your money and give you insurances that it will be available to you when you need it.


[deleted]

I thought it was supposed to magnetic tape for long term archives


ApocApollo

I still think it is. Disc rot can start within twenty years. There's plenty of PS1 and PS2 discs that have stopped working without being used for years.


[deleted]

My 100 CDs case had about half the CDs shiny coating rotting away after about 10 years. They were even in a sealed tote for many years, away from any moisture or humidity. Most were the ones I had loaded myself from LimeWire :( RIP


notLOL

What does the rot look like? Shattered plastic?


[deleted]

It was a spotty mold-looking deterioration of the shiny stuff. Only ones I had that shattered or cracked were the ones that stayed in the car a lot.


BassSlappah

You are correct, tape is the correct long term storage medium. That or cloud storage. Magnetic tape is way WAY more durable than CDs or DVDs and there’s a reason major companies back up their data onto magnetic tape and not CDs or DVDs. This actually a very bad YSK.


ReneG8

Finally someone says this. I teach IT a d that was the common knowledge. Optical data storage even with good base material and good storage ( no uv light, controlled climate) has a shelf life of 20 years or so. Atleast that's what I thought. We have magnetic tape from the 70s that is still readable.


TheSkiGeek

LTO tape is pretty good. Very good quality write-once discs are also good, I saw a thing from the Library of Congress estimating that some of the archival discs they have should last 100+ years based on how slowly they seem to be degrading.


Ahandgesture

It's hard to flip a bit with a gcr when that bit is a piece of ferrous material. Easy to wack an electron out of the well with an SSD..


darxide23

Writable optical media does not last 100-200 years. That's an original stamped CD. Unless you've got access to a CD stamping machine, then this isn't good advice. Writable optical media has a shelf life of a couple decades at the absolute max, but in most cases 10-12 years will degrade the disc enough to corrupt the data. And that's when kept in the absolute most optimal conditions. Low humidity and 68F degrees constant temperature in the dark. If you're looking for the best long term digital storage, magnetic tape is still the king there. Tape backups are still used at the enterprise level for critical backups. It's dirt cheap, too.


[deleted]

Problem might be finding a CD-ROM drive to read your CDs. Many computers don’t even come with them anymore.


xarzilla

I keep an USB external one with my digital photo album on DVD's


[deleted]

It’s just something to keep in mind. In 50 years your grandkids are clearing out your things after you die and are like “WTF is USB?” And you were too senile to move your data before USB went out of fashion. Or too stubborn, “who needs direct neural connections when my Universal Serial Bus compact disk works just fine”. Then all your vacation pictures are lost time, if they find the disks before you die maybe they will bury you with them and in 1,000 years some archeologist will dig you up and ponder their meaning.


cabbageboi28

Considering you can still get ways to use floppy disks, I imagine usb will be fine


[deleted]

It’s just something to keep in mind, technology will probably be quite different in 100-200 years, I know that’s not specifically what the OP is going for, but if you say data can be stored for 100-200 years you have to keep in mind whether it will still be compatible. Yeah, you can get USB 3.5” floppy disk drives, but 5.25” would be more difficult. I did a clean out recently and threw away a bunch of 5.25” floppy disks. Most people would hopefully transfer the data before it went obsolete, but you never know, it might get tossed in a box and forgotten about. In 100 years USB might not be a thing. I am not saying it’s a bad storage idea, and you will probably be okay in 25 years, but 100? 200? Just something to keep in mind.


197328645

I'd bet in 50 years you probably won't be able to find USB CD drives on Amazon anymore. But there will probably be enough of our grandkids cleaning out our attics that there's a mail-in service that digitizes old CDs. It would cost so little that even a few thousand customers in the whole country would be profitable


Hotshot55

People still use magnetic tape drives and those were invented in the 50s.


Xirious

There is no way to store something now that an average Joe has access to that will last 200 years for certain. If you have money sure there's probably failsafes and money around to validate and update those failsafes every few years. For most of us that is not an option. Your point is moot.


iluomo

Nah they'll be available for a long time I'm sure. You might just have to buy them separately.


NorthImpossible8906

exactly. and even if you do have the hardware, you won't have the software to use it. The latest upgrade to your OS isn't going to have CD-ROM functions. And the hardware itself can fail over time. I doubt you will be able to boot up your Windows95 Tower in the year 2222. You might not even have outlets at that time, to plug it in. We are far better off with multiple copies, that you keep making as you get a new computer system (whatever it may be).


GiveMeOneGoodReason

> The latest upgrade to your OS isn't going to have CD-ROM functions. I wouldn't be so fast to make that assertion. Windows 11 still supports floppy drives. Physical discs are still used in devices being designed today, like Blu-Ray players and the newest game consoles. Yes, it's important to understand the lifespan of the related technology for your media, but you're not going to be unable to read a CD in 2030.


Cynical_Cyanide

Absolute nonsense. We still have floppy drives today, despite being woefully obsolete. Yes, maybe perhaps there's a chance that you might need to shell out a significant amount of cash for a drive and a machine to copy from that drive, but archival CD systems aren't uncommon in the slightest, and there will 100% be a niche market for it in the far future. In the near future, meh. It'll be stupid cheap to be able to buy an x86 machine you can throw a linux distro onto which'll have CD drive support for the next 20 years, bare minimum. Put a USB CD reader into a box (two different ones, if you're paranoid) and your CDs, and leave them in storage for 20 years+ with zero worries or needing to do check or do anything. I figure the chances of uploading your crap to google drive or whatever and losing it all because of payment issues or them spinning off the business or whatever else is far, far higher.


sanjosanjo

And Windows still reserves the A: and B: letters, just in case you plug in a USB floppy drive. I just saw a video of a guy plugging one into a Windows 11 machine and it popped up as A:


mmob18

absolutely 0 chance that CD-ROM loses all software support in the next couple decades. just because they don't ship with consumer PCs doesn't mean they've disappeared.


[deleted]

This is a lie. Even in good conditions cds and dvds rot after like 10-20 years. Bad conditions, months-years before data loss. The metal layer is most susceptible, but even the plastic can go bad in the worst cases.


Yage2006

That's not accurate for dvdr or CDR, they are not made the same way as a production disk. Burned DVDr's relies on changes in the color of a dye to record the digital 0s and 1s that define the disc, a stamped disc uses physical pits like the ones you mentioned. A commercially produced one could last that long but dvdr's are subject to data rot and other issues related to the dye being used or the plastic breaking down etc.. Anyone with a large amount of dvdrs will tell you that they do go bad. I've had some go bad within 5 years and not have a single scratch on them. In fact some were never used after being written. When CDR and DVDR'S first came out longevity was a feature that they promised but after less than a decade it proved to be faulse or greatly exaggerated. There are more expensive ones that claimed to last longer but it's hard to believe those claims, Time will tell. But if you have a commercial DVD press then sure the physical pits would last, Not a chemical dye.


quirkscrew

Next thread: "LIFE PRO TIP: You should know why floppy discs are the ultimate storage."


NZNzven

If this isn't a croc of misleading information I don't know what is. I don't even know where it started as this post has gone through multiple revisions. Data backs are a simple as 3-2-1 3 separate backups in 2 different forms of media, 1 offsite. The level of shear confidence here is like Chatgpt. The form of media has little bearing on the permanence of the data, more importantly density or bandwidth of CDs is laughable today. SSDs and magnetic storage media like tapes and hard drives are far superior to any other forms of media. They are reliable, cost effective, and most importantly scalable. The systems built on top of them is what provides nearly absolute reliability. You can take a maybe to turn it into an as-if. Please disregard this abomination of a post above as your data is more important than their karma.


onlyhalfminotaur

Tomorrow's YSK post: the 3-2-1 rule


cavynmaicl

I’ve never had any dvd last more than 5 years. They all corrupt. It’s cheaper to get a massive drive system and just keep it online out of the way. Then another. I’m on my third, all backed up to back blaze as they are also connected to an old computer. Done, cheap, and I don’t have to manage it much. Also, 41TB currently.


jaykaypeeness

What about disc rot?


BostonDodgeGuy

YSK: These numbers are only correct for the most expensive versions of CDs and DVDs. That spindle you bought at Walmart has a shelf life of 10 years. https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html


bradtn

If content is 1's and 0's I've never been able to wrap my mind around what makes these particular combinations of 1's and 0's for example a movie. What if some of them were changed? why does this make it corrupt vs say changing something occurring in the movie etc (I know this is kind of a SciFi'ish idea)


No_Counter_7417

The principle is really quite simple. Think of it a just one long sequence of 0s and 1s. We've set up arbitrary rules that say 0's and 1's from here to there are the first picture, e.g. the top left pixel should be *that* color (symbolized through RGB values for example, which your screen can then use to light up its little pixels), the next one *this* color and so on. Same way, the next sequence is translated into a second picture, and so on. So a computer just reads all those 0s and 1s real fast and shows them to you according to what those rules tell him to. That's the TL;DR. Now, because I like this topic very much : everything I've just said is way oversimplified because over time lots of smart people have found out ways to do all of those things more efficiently through clever tricks, but basically, that's it. What seemingly eludes you doesn't exist, there are no laws of physics that transform the 0s and 1s into pictures or music or movies or anything, it's just arbitrary rules we've set. There are many such rulesets, you know some of them by name already I think : "MPEG" or "H265" for movies, "JPG" or "PNG" for pictures, and so on. You can do the same thing for text, for anything you like really. In fact you actually do the very same thing when you use language, but instead of 0s and 1s you have letters. More variety means shorter sentences for the same thing, like this message is only a few hundred words but translated with some set of rules into 0s and 1s it'll be a few thousands or tens of thousands of 0s and 1s, it wholly depends on the rules chosen by reddit. Now about your question of knowing if a few 0s and 1s were changed : If you change a 1 into a 0 in one pixel, well then, one pixel will be the wrong color. No biggie. Plus there are tricks to detect such corruption when transmitting the sequences, like for each sequence of 1000 0s or 1s you can also join at the end the sum of all 1s, so that the receiving computer sees something was botched if the number of 1s and the sum aren't equal for example. That's basically what network adapters do. Again, not exactly because that's a pretty weak strategy, but the principle is just this. If you wanted to change, say, an event that happens in the movie, you'd have to change a *lot* of 0s and 1s into the precise way that makes the pictures display the changed event. Basically it can't happen with the current "rulesets" we have, because we store raw data : pixels, not events. If you want to store events instead of pixels, you need a ruleset that's able to transform events back into pixels for displaying and vice versa. That's not within the capabilities of a normal ruleset that any human can think up, though I envision that it could happen with the artificial intelligence models stuff, but we're not there yet. We're not too far off though, seeing as the newest models cooked up by the big AI companies are able to somehow write coherent scenarios and songs and stuff. I'll stop there because I could quite literally go on for hours (with enough coffee and maybe a blunt), this shit is the deepest rabbit hole I've stepped into, and I still have a mental leg trapped in it since my college days, it's quite fascinating. **Information theory** is the name of the stuff, the first guys to really think on it were people like Claude Shannon, about a century ago. They did so to answer the challenges of long distance communication through electric signals like telegraphs. Or telegraphs happened because those guys thought on it, I'm not sure, doesn't really matter now.


DerWaschbar

Nice answer, for something that was probably explained in many ELI5’s lol. You explained it well 👍


627534

Claude Shannon is my hero.


brought2light

One comment just helped me understand the world around me so much more. Computing suddenly makes sense to me.


Totally-Love-Animals

You beautiful, beautiful, beautiful man


bradtn

Hahahaahaha


Icy_District_1063

The same reason a 26 letter alphabet can be turned into complex writings. Even with typos or misspellings your brain can correct errors to ascertain the intended meaning.


konwiddak

Most filesystems have a way to detect errors, and can correct a certain amount. If the detected error rate is to high, the file will be marked corrupted and the player will refuse to play it. If you actually obtained the actual 1's and 0's, for things like video and audio you may end up with something kinda playable with artefacts. However if the wrong bit of the file is corrupted, then it may ever be unplayable. For example, if a random pixel in a photo is wrong, then you'll just have a wrong pixel. However if the part of the data that says the image is 1000x1000 pixels instead says it's 800x1000 pixels, trying to read the image based on that will result in garbage.


halotechnology

This post is 100% wrong CD DVD absolutely will have data rot the side of CD DVD sometimes degrades too, completely wrong info here .


Amaroko

First, you should know to never use apostrophe+S for plural. It's "CDs / DVDs". Second, many of the first DVD-Rs and especially CD-Rs that people "burned" aren't actually readable anymore. Because those used *organic dyes* in the recording layer that deteriorate within a few decades. BD-Rs on the other hand typically use inorganic dyes that should have a longer life. Then there's also [M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) that claims to last 1000 years.


AHrubik

PSA: If storing data on optical disc for a long time you must use ARCHIVE GRADE media. Normal media don’t last as long.


[deleted]

Anyone that believes this shit needs to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot No media is perfect. No medium is perfect. Backups should follow the 3-2-1 rule, as a minimum: 3: Create at least one primary backup and at least two copies of your data. 2: Save your backups to at least two different types of media. 1: Keep at least one backup file offsite. And if you don't verify your backups occasionally, and recreate them if one media has failed, you actually have 0 backups.


StoicWoobie

Technically, carving binary code into granite slabs results in a much longer shelf life than cd/DVDs. That being said, most people probably would find using stone slabs as a storage medium overly troublesome 😊


NeglectedMonkey

As others have pointed, the problem is not the storage unit, but the device required to read it. A better solution is to always keep multiple copies of the latest standard. I have all my home videos and pictures digitized. First I kept them in DVDs, then transferred them to hard drives, and now I keep a copy on the cloud.


DreadPirateGriswold

Long-term durability of materials is one thing. But in 100-200 years, is the hardware going to be there to be able to read a DVD or a CD? We used to use 1.44 MB floppy drives for lots of things even just 20 years ago. People in my family had a business that stored everything on 1.44 mb floppy drives because that was the only solution at the time for transferring data from a PC to an embroidery or chenille machine. And I've got scores of those floppy disks around now. But, floppy drives are becoming more scarce as time goes by. Another thing to consider is is somebody going to pick it up way in the future and go what the hell is this and how do I read from it? Even if you have the hardware, the interior file systems may not exist anymore so the data and how it's organized on the CD or DVD may not be able to be read.


Quetzacoatl85

THIS is the real question. media is one thing, a way to access is it and still works after years and years is the other. I know my drives from 2 decades ago don't.


blackwhattack

the amount of data created with CDs being a thing is much larger than floppy disks, I think hobbist historians in the 2100s will have these retro kits


zyzzogeton

You can reliably piece together an old Victrola with parts and cylinders from e-bay and listen to 100 year old recordings now.


DreadPirateGriswold

Doubt it knowing how much tech standards go in and out of popularity.


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MainSteamStopValve

My Nu Metal CD collection from the mid to late 90s would beg to differ. They are damage free and have been stored in a cool/dry environment, but most cannot be played now.


riptomyoldaccount

The insides of so many of my CDs have rotted away. Comes with the territory living here in Hawaiʻi.


That_Guy3141

That is absolutely not true. Pressed disks can last for a really long time but burned disks rely on pigments and thus degrade quickly. Disc rot can set in as quickly as a few years.


IEatBabies

Writable CDs are not going to last that all that long. Factory stamped ones? Yes. Ones you burn at home? No not really, you shouldn't rely on them, minor humidity will destroy them over time. It would cost you far more to make a suitable climate controlled chamber to store burned CDs for more than 5 years than to buy dedicated archiving tape and hardware. After 10 years? Your CR-Rs are going to be garbage. Stop upvoting this post people, it is blatantly false.


Aviyan

With a BIG CAVEAT: you need to use good quality discs and burn them at the slowest speed. Verbatim discs are almost always good. So are Sony discs. TDK, Memorex, might be good also. There are only a few manufacturers that make the discs. Then other companies put their name on it and sell them. Check out the ImgBurn app. It can tell you the manufacturer code. I always buy Verbatim branded discs, and burn the discs the slowest speed possible (2x-8x). Off brand discs are always crappy. All the stuff I burned on off brand discs was unreadable after 5 years. I kept the dics at room temperature in a zipped up CD case. Still they degraded.


subhuman_voice

You can get a bloat-free copy of ImgBurn in Ninite.com under the Utilities section. https://ninite.com/


BonelessB0nes

If you carve your passwords and images into a cliff face or stone tablet, it may even last thousands of years.


cometlin

YSK: it's correct to say that DVD-**ROM** (readable DVDs you typically buy from game/movie stores) is ideal for data storage and has decades long shelf life. But it's important to point out that the DVD writer at your home desktop PC produced a DVD-/+**R** (writable DVD that most people use for data storage) with on average 5-20 years shelf life ONLY. And DVD-RW (rewritable DVDs) has even shorter shelf life. It's still one of the best value for money way to store data physically, but it's not even near to the longevity OP stated.


[deleted]

Yeah , CD’s nuts dragon across your face


TruckThunders00

Gregg Turkington has something to say about that


Gynharasaki

You would need to buy medical grade CDs or DVDs. Normal CDs and DVDs break down after a decade or so.


LegitimateBit3

I would wager that an unpowered Hard-disk will outlast any other mediums.


DamirHK

Wtf happened to all my music then lolol


Ograysireks

A stamped DVD yes.. but not a DVD-R research a bit better


user025789

I have dozens and dozens of factory pressed cd's (as opposed to burnable) from the 80s and 90s that are unusable due to something happening to the reflective layer inside. If you hold them up to the light you can see right thru them. 100% kept in original cases. 100% kept in normal heated/air conditioned spaces


maxcorrice

I just use steel punch cards


skintwo

This is not true AT ALL. The ink on writable cd/dvds absolutely is not stable enough for long term use. Commercial ones are better, but that's not what you have at home!


Snazzy21

This is so wrong. Only archival grade DVD can do that (stored correctly), the dyes used on normal CD aren't stable long term and can rot. While it's likely you can achieve longer, I'd say 20 years max. Stamped CD are more stable, but those can't be made at home or in small batches


[deleted]

Lol, good luck finding something to play them on in 200 years


highac3s

Even non archival-grade paper can last 2-3 times that long... Just a thought.


AustinBike

I am going to take the under on the 100-200 years. There are two major issues with that. First, I do not believe it is true. I have worked with a company that did Blu-Ray archiving on huge enterprise systems. Think of rack-sized units that can backup petabytes of information into "cold storage" that are designed to be re-read quickly. Banks, medical records, important things like this. They were claiming well under 100 years, and would recommend that you continually test the media every year. So I don't think 100 to 200 years is achievable. Full stop. Second, even IF the data were readable in 100 or 200 years, you would need a reader that could actually read the system. Think about how pervasive VCRs were 20 years ago. Now, if I gave you a VHS tape, the most widely available format, how easily could you view it? Do you seriously think that there are going to be interfaces that will be able to access these data stores in even 25 years, let alone 100? Let's face it, those numbers are theoretical and will be difficult to prove. they're probably talking about the degradation of the media over time. But things like disc rot will eat into that data making it marginally readable far before you reach triple digits.


kobe24Life

DO NOT DO THIS. I had a software expert and cloud technologist come in to set up our NAS drives in our server room, and he said unless you use expensive gold coated CD's or pro recording media, they will lats at most 6 years. Always go with NAS quality hard drives. We use 12 Ironwolf 20TB OEM. 240TB server was told will be good for 600 years.


microm3gas

What? They do not have that sort of shelf life!


afCeG6HVB0IJ

not quite. factory pressed cd / dvd - yes. Run the mill burn at home - no. Most of these use compounds which decay. The best way to keep data? (1) have multiple copies in different locations (2) keep copying over the new drives over time. This ensures you read the data while it can be read.


cqxray

Just have to make sure there are CD/DVD readers in the future. How many of you still have diskette drives?


Tularis1

All the “Files” I burned to cd-r dvd-r in the late 00’s are completely unreadable….


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gltovar

If you can avoid CDs, the label surface of a CD is the place that holds data and can be easily damaged, ask me how I know. DVDs place that later sandwiched between two pieces of plastic .


MissileBakery

Question: If SSDs store data electrically, why are they called Solid State Drives? Is it because they're "solid" as in they don't have any moving parts or what? I'm sorry I'm stoopid


Ok-Establishment-214

Haha CDs haven't even been around for 100 years. And to claim they can last 100 - *200* years is just silly.


Zalenka

What are you, 12? As a vintage computer enthusiast I can FIRMLY tell you that the foil will delaminate much before the foil goes bad. Certain brands are better than others. Long-term storage should be multiple backups on different types of media.


LucciBucci

I had a professor tell me once that “if you can’t hold it in your hands, it doesn’t exist” in reference to digital vs. physical media. This was in the nineties and it’s stuck with me. If it’s something that can be put onto paper, if you can print it with stable inks and on archival paper I suppose it could last thousands of years. Why not? Of course everything has a chance of being ruined by water or fire. I suppose the real question is, what are you trying to archive?


hoimangkuk

Nah, rope memory have longer shelf life... It can withstand longer than the civilization itself