DVDs, Blu-rays, and VHS tapes: How long does physical media last?
DVDs, Blu-rays, and VHS tapes: How long does physical media last?
The exact lifespan of physical media is hard to pin down
I've got music CDs from the early 90s that still work fine. Even CD-r and rw discs from the late 90s and early 2000s work.
Hell, I recently found a stack of 3.5" diskettes that still work.
The only time I've had an issue with media is when it's been physically abused (I.e. scratched or damaged).
I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That's how I archived everything.
There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.
I can't say I've tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years...
Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.
There are a lot of variables, but media types typically have expected limits established.
https://www.arcserve.com/blog/data-storage-lifespans-how-long-will-media-really-last
Humidity and UV are murder on a lot of things. Pressed optical media will generally las a lot longer than CD-R if for nothing else but the top layer over the reflective foil that's missing from some cheap recordable disks. The error resiliency is a factor to thin of too. If you miss a few bits in a picture or audio recording it won't do much, but in a executable program it could prevent it working at all.
In my opinion it's wildly dependent on the quality of the media.
Crappy writeable CDs that didn't last a month, to verbatim CDs that are still running 20 years later.
Hard drives, chep equals a year or three, all my WD black still works and the oldest is from 2013.
Some luck I guess too ofc :-)
I'm currently using a 2008 hard drive and i really hope it has some life left in it because i haven't backed up the contents yet
Yeah but you're a caveman so that's the reason.
When I was younger, I bought a fair bit of music CDs, mostly for the sake of collecting. To this day, most are still unopened in their original plastic wrap. I no longer have a disc player in any of my computers, nor any functional discman left in my possession, so listening/ripping them is probably never going to happen.
Sometimes I see people complaining about digital versions, but looking back, it probably really don’t matter nearly as much for vast majority of the cases…