Comments on: Ripped Off? Burned CD-Rs Have 2 Year Shelf Life

by: Jimmy Brown

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:36:13 +0000

Sorry to say that your study is full of BULLSHIT!!! I have original CDs from early 1980’s and burnt my own in late 80’s on Macs and they are still fine. They will last fro 50-100 years!! Whoever wrote this article is stupid!!!!

by: Raw Octopus

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:16:22 +0000

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.

by: Canned Raddish

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:04:04 +0000

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)

by: Crunchy Nougat

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 03:36:04 +0000

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.

by: justin

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 07:45:43 +0000

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

by: ed3

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:13:57 +0000

[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.

by: Robert Claypool

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 04:13:22 +0000

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.

by: Goshen

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 01:55:19 +0000

Makes one wonder who funded the study, no ? Maybe Memorex or possibly Fuji Film

by: jbelkin

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 20:28:30 +0000

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.

by: MarcosV

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 16:03:23 +0000

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…