15 year CD-R video archival test

The real test will be finding a viable CD-R reader in 10 more years lol Optical media are definitely good long term backup solutions for data. I should burn more of my stuff to CD-Rs.

If you're an Amazon Prime member, you have 5GB cloud space + unlimited pictures included with your plan; I have ~55GB of pictures stored with them. $60/yr gets you unlimited everything storage, just upload 10TB, sky's the limit..

The more serious long term problem is the availability of devices that can actually read old media. Try finding an 8 inch floppy drive these days. Early in my career in the computer industry one of my users brought me a tape. He said he needed the data on it. It was from a Bendix G15 computer. At least I knew what a G15 was, but the technology had moved on to the point that there was no possibility of ever getting the data off the tape any longer. The devices that were designed to read it no longer existed. I suspect in another 5 years it will be impossible to find working VCR's. I am not even sure anyone still makes them. Fortunately the CD has been evolved, and it has not been all that difficult to maintain compatibility as we have moved to multi-layer DVD designs, but at some point those products are all going to vanish, and then it doesn't make any difference whether the media is still good, there will nothing available to read it!

Personally I would argue against using CD-R or other optical media for long-term archiving, with the possible exception of the Mdisc system. I've seen many studies also not recommending CD-R archiving.

Briefly, beside the capacity being pretty low these days, there are several different construction and chemical dye methods used with different stability, optimal burn speeds and durability. Some seem to last pretty well, some become unplayable after a day in the sun in the car.

The data integrity is not so great, especially for audio CD-Rs. Audio CD-Rs can burn with no indication of burn flaws/data errors. They will also play back or rip with no indication of these errors. Listening/watching is not a good indicator, as it depends greatly on the error correction and concealment of a particular player, and it takes a lot of time and effort. Data CD-Rs should be better for checking data integrity, but it seems the failure mode is that one day, it simply does not read at all.

The standard for checking optical disc integrity is to analyze the error rates. At work, we used the Clover Systems CDX analyzer, and now we use Plextools. These analyze, tally, and chart several levels of correctable and uncorrectable errors on a disc (as your player would encounter), faster than real time. I have an audio CD-R burned in 1990, and it still analyzes (and plays) fine today, but I have other CD-Rs much newer that no longer play. The 1990 CD-R is a Taiyo Yuden, and when I got it in 1990, I was told the blanks were about $50 USD each.

What to do? To be honest, my Uni still makes audio CD-Rs on MAM Gold blanks but only for convenience, and we are not relying on them for long term archiving even if they claim 100 years. Mainly because of the amount of data we generate, the recommendations from the likes of the Library of Congress and others is to use computer storage systems (hard drives/tape) with triple redundancy or more, and SHA hashes for checking integrity after regular recopying of all data. There is still lots of controversy about the whole archival concept.

mattheww50 said:

The more serious long term problem is the availability of devices that can actually read old media. Try finding an 8 inch floppy drive these days. Early in my career in the computer industry one of my users brought me a tape. He said he needed the data on it. It was from a Bendix G15 computer. At least I knew what a G15 was, but the technology had moved on to the point that there was no possibility of ever getting the data off the tape any longer. The devices that were designed to read it no longer existed. I suspect in another 5 years it will be impossible to find working VCR's. I am not even sure anyone still makes them. Fortunately the CD has been evolved, and it has not been all that difficult to maintain compatibility as we have moved to multi-layer DVD designs, but at some point those products are all going to vanish, and then it doesn't make any difference whether the media is still good, there will nothing available to read it!

Click to expand...

The equipment to read each type of archival media does not need to exist forever.
It only needs to exist long enough to allow transfer to the next generation of archival media format.

I have lots of ancient floppy discs, but there is no need to find a drive to read them, as all of the contents were transferred to optical media for archiving years ago.

I used to use those 300 for $6 logs and luckily many failed in the first 90 days....otherwise I wouldv'e used them for long term storage.

I found that Sony discs at that point used a gold core in their consumer blanks. Yeah they were 100 for $20, but definitely worth it.

Got some ~20yr experiments lying about the place myself. A 15 year old disc loaded just fine the other week.

A lot depends upon the quality of the medium. Cheap CD-R discs I'd bought in bulk were fine for the first few years, but started to suffer bad data. You'd be playing a CD and then hit a bad spot where the unit would either freeze up or advance to the next track. And for some reason, the outermost tracks were more susceptible. The ones I'd bought from more brand recognized names like Verbatim and Sony rarely seem to show bad data. Of course, I'm just letting them sit around these days as I don't listen to music from CD's as much as I used to.

I think the most reliable storage these days is magnetic disk, good old fashioned hard drives. I've got a couple that are 15 years old. Not much capacity, but what's on them still checks out A-OK. It probably just comes down to migrating data from device to device. For long term, I'd be more comfortable with magnetic than solid state.

I remember when CDRs were first becoming popular, and Taiyo Yuden blanks had a good reputation. In general a number of brands that came out of Japan were thought to be good quality, as well as those that were made in a Kodak factory in France. I stocked up n those Kodaks while they were available and I never had a failure.

These days the machined that produce CDRs have been bought and sold all over the place so it's harder to tell what's really good by reading the ATIP track.

Picked the oldest CD-R I could find (Imation 700MB CD-R, stored in a CD binder) and it read OK so whatever corruption that may or may not have occurred hasn't destroyed the file table. It's a bunch of .RM's from 1999 that likely have postage stamp resolution so verifying integrity isn't something I'm prepared to do.

Some other CD-Rs from 2000 (CompUSA 650MB), (HP 650MB) with .AVIs played fine.

My main issue right now is atrophy with the drive itself - after years of non-use the tray on my DVD burner does not eject reliably, necessitating some MacGyver action. Perhaps I should accelerate plans to recover the files I actually want to disk.

A quick sample of my CD-R and CD-RW discs seem fine from about 1998-early 2000s. I typically used Sony and Philips brands.

The crazy thing too is that tech storage has advanced far enough so that it's probably a better solution to buy a few (or many) relatively large USB flash drives and back up a significant amount of data on them and keep them in various secure places. Even keep the data encrypted on them if you'd like. Especially if we're talking about file sizes that were meant to be small enough for CD-R anyway.

You can get 64GB drives for under 14 dollars and 128GB drives for not much more than 20. If you can do that with 2 or even 3 redundant drives that you check every once in a while maybe it's still way easier than having to burn data to tons of optical media. There are very large optical medias and future ones are rumored to be able to hold many many TB of data, but that's very different (at least in cost/relevancy) to good old CD-R tech.

Obviously at the moment it's really expensive, but I just heard they have been able to make a 1TB micro-SD card.... What....?

One physical copy on site.
One physical copy off site.
One cloud copy.

The physical copies will have to be updated to new formats every few years, choose only media that is currently ubiquitous.