April 8th, 2006
Ripped Off? Burned CD-Rs Have 2 Year Shelf Life
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
Remember when CDs were supposed to last forever? I was once told that you could smash a disc with a sledgehammer and the data could still be recovered. But like most people I shrugged and settled for the hope that they would last longer than the good old fashioned cassette tape.
Turns out a BURNED CD-R has an expected shelf life of 2 years. TWO.
Researchers for IBM Germany have discovered that burning a CD-R disc activates a heat sensitive dye and brings the shelf life from 5 - 10 years of a an un-burned disc down to a measly two years. (Source: Popular Mechanics Mag)
We Say: The ultimate irony is the fact that good old fashioned magnetic tape has a shelf life of 30 - 100 years. Ah progress…..Two tips to consider: store your CDs in a dark place (like photos and women in California 
light can speed aging.) And then remember that tape is great, but you need the hardware which may not always be around. Then again, CDs are phasing out too, so prepare yourself for the next storage device of choice. I have CDs that are over 5 years old, so don’t panic and then back-up if you really, really need the data.
chris says:
This is just plain dumb. I have lots of CDs I burned 8 or 9 years ago that are still perfectly fine. On the other hand, magnetic tape, though usually a fine medium, has been known to deteriorate within 20 years. Vinyl rocks!
April 8th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Dave Barnes says:
The issue of “lack of a reader” has been weel understood in the data processing industry for decades.
7-track mag tape was replaced by 9-track by 18-track by 36-track. Finding old tape readers is a very expensive and painful process. Just ask the oil companies.
The only difference is that now, the average consumer, is expected to pay attention to this problem. Not likely.
,dave
April 8th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Boaz Arad says:
Two things I don’t get:
1. I have a few maxtor cd’s in my archive that claim to have a shelf life of 120 years. I don’t actually buy the 120 year shelf life - but how could they be off by 118 years?
2. Why haven’t MiniDisks become a computer storage media? their smaller than cd’s, and I’m guessing their more durable.
Also, as chris said, I have quiet a few cd’s over 5 and 8 eight years old, that read just fine. This alleged “two year shelf life” , might just be for a CD-R left outside in the sun, or maybe handled with a sledgehammer
April 8th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Paul Kuhlmann says:
They worried about these things 100 years ago with those very fragile and meltable wax cylinder disks. Well, My 1907 Edison gramaphone still works and the sound quality is pretty good. The music selection was surprisingly good too. ‘Ship Ahoy’ and ‘The Hobnail Boots That My Father Wore’ were just wonderful and are still playable.
April 8th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Charles says:
Only recently did it become possible to store data of any type to a MiniDisc. Sony completely botched the MiniDisc format as they typically do in these situations.
Also, I don’t think any MiniDisc can store 650MB for the price of a 50 cent CDR.
April 9th, 2006 at 12:38 am
Mikey says:
So whats left? Do we all rush out and buy “the next big thing” in mass data storage? (I’m -not- planning on spending more money to maintain my older data files. I think I’ll just keep on re-writing every 18 months.)
I haven’t seen any really good consumer oriented devices outside of really big hard drives.
April 9th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Bluejade says:
you are concerned about CD-R but what about DVD-R? they have even more problems with durability and reliability : (
April 9th, 2006 at 4:37 am
kate says:
I have but two words TAIYO YUDEN
http://www.t-yuden.com/recordablemedia/index.cfm
these are the people who invented CD-R they have a very very long lifetime
April 9th, 2006 at 5:48 am
MarcosV says:
Minidiscs could store data for quite some time. Grant you before Hi-MD, these over priced data drives weren’t worth it.
Only recently with Hi-MD did Sony have non-music data store capbility emphasized with the format — all Hi-MD players can act like a USB hard drive. You can get 1 GB blanks for $6/each mail ordered (rare to find anything MD in stores).
I still like MD format because the MD disc themselves are extremely durable — unlike cheap 50 cent CDs whose quality is questionable (I use Taiyo Yuden blanks as my decent quality standard). MD is a great format for portable audio recording and I’ve stored data on the MD discs as offline storage (i.e., important data isn’t erased form the disc after I transferred the data to my computer).
In the end, MDs will be phased out. We definitely need to find a really good backup media that’s practical. Backing up terrabytes of data to Taiyo Yuden DVD blanks are a pain. I’m hoping HD-DVD or Blu Ray data back becomes affordable and reliable soon.
In the meantime, maybe I should start looking into those automated DVD juteboxes with built-in printers. Set somthing up to copy 2-year old disks to new media on a regular bases…
April 9th, 2006 at 8:03 am
jbelkin says:
IBM Germany must have some other agenda - either that or they are idiots. Yes, I know that a lot of people burn a CD-R and use it in the car - no sleeve - hot, cold - and they seem to work okay but I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped working after a few years but they’re not exactly treating it like gold anyway.
As for my data CD’s - all stored in sleeves - they ALL work fine. In fact, two months I was looking for a font and dragged out some discs from 1997 and they all mounted fine. A few years back, I had access to a floppy so I converted all those backups to CD-R and out of maybe 80 floppies, only one went bad … and of course, honestly, most of my backup CD-R’s, I have never bothered to re-open … yes, it’s a good idea to back up your taxes from 10 years ago but honestly, unless your taxes filings are 125 pages thick - the truth is that old data is just that.
April 9th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Goshen says:
Makes one wonder who funded the study, no ? Maybe Memorex or possibly Fuji Film
April 9th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Robert Claypool says:
It probably depends on the CD-R manufactuers. Also, newer CD-R’s are likely to be less reliable in terms of lifespan than older ones as newer manufactuers have discovered less reliable materials to make CD-R’s out of. I bought a stack of name-brand CD-RW’s a few years ago that are developing errors that don’t get uncovered unless you copy the files that are on bad spots. I have new no label CD-R’s that are proving to be very unreliable. Two years is probably an average, as well. Also, the article is talking about CD-R’s only, not CD-RW’s. Most of my data is AMV’s (Anime Music Videos) though.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
ed3 says:
[AOL]Me too.[/AOL] Many discs, more than 2yo, blah blah…
Although in my experience a big contributing factor to CD/DVD lifespan is labelling. About a year ago I archived some files off to DVD+R for “safe keeping”. Printed off some nice “proper” labels, slapped them on the discs and filed them in a metal filing cabinet. Recently I tried to access the data. Half of it came up errored. Unlabelled media burned around the same time was fine.
Long story short, the Avery CD/DVD labels I bought have a nice big red sticker (appears added after the fact) which at first glance say “Guaranteed”. Looking closer in small print around the edge of the sticker it says “DO NOT USE ON RECORDABLE DVD’s”… DOH!!!! Best I can figure the labels are not temperature/humidty stable (having a paper-like upper layer).
Personally, modern magnetic tape is still worlds better for long-term data storage, particularly DLT or LTO. Too bad it’s just too darned expensive for the normal home user.
PS - And for the MiniDisc people, nice format, but HiMD and the price cuts came too late. Too bad someone else didn’t invent it. Sony’s track record for creating media formats isn’t exactly stellar.
April 10th, 2006 at 5:13 am
justin says:
i know this is old but id just like to say the reason mini disks never caught on is because sony made them
and we all know sony sucks
July 16th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Crunchy Nougat says:
I am going to burn a copy of this scintillating discussion on a CD, bury it, and hopefully in 50 years the disk will either have gone bad or I’ll be dead. Either way I won’t get the last minute of my life back.
July 17th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Canned Raddish says:
Is Hi-MD really reliable storage? The one that comes with the recorder isn’t. Also, what if they stop making the disks? I guess there’s too many out there for them to STOP making the disks. In fact…I bet they’re still making money of the manufacturing of the disks, they must have a huge plant somewhere still making hi-md mini disks….so I can’t say hi-md was a complete failure (for them anyway) I’m not so sure the hi-md is reliable, I think I have one that went bad, and now I have to buy a new one…(Sony smiles)
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Raw Octopus says:
I was recently digging through my archives for some old, but important files that I burned back in 2000. Turns out that these CDs now appear to hold zero bytes of data.
February 24th, 2008 at 1:16 pm