A quick PSA about your old home burned CD-R discs

[K_W]

A quick PSA about your old home burned CD-R's and other data.

It's 2017... affordable home burnable CD-R technology has been around for ~22-23 years now and I'm sure we all have used them.

The dye that makes this possible has a limited lifespan depending on the chemical. That is around 10-20 years for cheaper discs.

I just tried a quality CD-R, burned in 2003, with some old high school files on it... it had some visible dye fading but still read 100%.

Another cheaper disc from around 2005, it has a crack starting in the center hole and no longer reads in my laptop's drive. It's lost.

Pale green CD-R's are the most susceptible to "data fade", blue a bit less so, Gold is the least susceptible and is "archive grade".

If you have data archives on CD-R or CD-RW or DVD+/-R/RW it may be a good time to verify it's still good and make new backups.

If you have data on magnetic media like disks or traditional hard drives, it's well past time to look at converting it to optical media or solid state as prices of vintage hardware that still works is creeping up, hardware and software emulators for just about everything ever made are now available free online, and prices per GB of optical, SSD, and Flash media has never been lower.

Even if your data is on USB flash drives or SD cards, they do not last forever. Some estimate USB drives lose data faster than optical (10 yrs). I myself have had nearly new, properly ejected, name brand, store bought, SD cards fail for no known reason.

My recommendation for critical data is GOLD dye archival CD-R's/DVD or BD's stored with the external drive that recorded them.

You should rerecord and replace the drive every 10 years at most to ensure software and hardware compatibility with current tech.

If you have precious data, by far the most important part of backing up data is redundancy and multi-location storage. Do not keep all your data in one place or a single water leak, fire, or theft will destroy everything. Keep copies off site like in a bank deposit box.

To maximize the future-proofing of your data, store images and video uncompressed and in all the popular encoding formats, DO NOT USE a format that can only be read using the program or hardware that made it unless you have also stored the software and the hardware that runs it. Store extras.

For basic text, use universal formats if possible like .TXT or .DOC - for any file that has complex page formatting use care in choosing the format or converting formats and make static backups in PDF files and print.

If you use encryption, be sure to include a copy of the exact software that encrypted it and keep up with it's vulnerabilities and adapt.

EDIT:
I have games and data going as far back as 1994 and even earlier from a Commodore 128 that I had when I was in elementary school that I am slowly losing as the disks age and demagnetize. I've had trouble saving the Commodore's data due to the death of one of my drives (the one that recorded it) and a lack of viable blank disks and 2 of my 3 Commodore 64's CPU's have failed and the 3rd glitches.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

I am glad you brought this up.I had forgot about their limited life.Time has flown.

 

[Indy-Mike]

if there is something on those disks you need, copy it to new media.

 

[oldpink]

This is why if your only copy of some specific data is going to be on CD-R, DVD-R/DVD+R, or BD-R, try to get either Taiyo-Yuden or the gold blanks rated for archival purposes.

 

[RobbyMaQ]

good idea/thought for anyone who's kept media in a safe or storage closet. SOrta reminds me of people keeping home movies and 35mm in the attic only to find it spontaneously combusts!
Luckily I re-burn (no pun intended) adding data each year, and as technology progresses, so does the backup media...

My only saving grace is that 1-2 cds that far back held a lot of data... nowadays... not so much. sd cards for me nowadays for me mostly... until they ae deemed to blow up or something when the next best thing comes along. The older copies are kept in the event of a failure. Luckily, I am not searching for 20 yr old cd's nowadays

 

[K_W]

good idea/thought for anyone who's kept media in a safe or storage closet. SOrta reminds me of people keeping home movies and 35mm in the attic only to find it spontaneously combusts!
Luckily I re-burn (no pun intended) adding data each year, and as technology progresses, so does the backup media...

My only saving grace is that 1-2 cds that far back held a lot of data... nowadays... not so much. sd cards for me nowadays for me mostly... until they ae deemed to blow up or something when the next best thing comes along. The older copies are kept in the event of a failure. Luckily, I am not searching for 20 yr old cd's nowadays

Hate to break it to you, but Flash media has a shorter shelf life than optical. I have a pile of bad SD cards of all sizes and ages that have failed, some within just a few uses. I'm a barely a casual photographer and yet I have 8 bad name brand store bought cards right here in a little box from 128 MB SD to a San Disk Ultra 32 GB Micro Class 10... and that doesn't include the bad one's I've thrown out or an still using for just for non-critical transfers.

Another vulnerability of Flash is corruption from improper ejecting or even static discharge. Stick to optical.

----

Data was a lot harder to make and acquire back then too. Up until the mid 2000's we had to drive to the store to buy virtually all major software. Before iPod, digital music was on a CD or later ripped to your PC in near real time to lossy, metallic sounding 64k or maybe 128k bit rate MP3's. Rich kids could put that CD on a 64mb Creative Diamond Rio MP3 player (yes only about one CD fit on an MP3 player then), not rich but not poor kids had MP3 decoding CD players which could actually hold 10x more music, kids like me had a CD or tape player. If you didn't have an expensive 2+ megapixel digital camera then getting a decent photo meant you waited hours for physical photos then scanned them individually. Video was 240i or 480i, usually analog, transferred or "captured" in REAL-TIME, editing, rendering and uploading took even longer, if you even had the proper hardware. Up until 2005 the average home in the city was lucky to have 1 or 2 megabit internet or 56k Dial-up or Sat in the rural areas. "Instant Messaging" was only instant if you both were sitting at your home computers. Cell phones only made phone calls or a maybe texting by smashing number buttons. A camera phone, if you could afford one, took a grainy photo about the size of my avatar (320x240 pixles) and cost $0.25 to send to someone.

Those were the good old days.

 

[RobbyMaQ]

Manuf. of sd cards is hit and miss as I've learned. if my card fails, I usually notice during the backup (local media is good), or I have a backup (1-4 weeks old), plus dvd backups (3-6 months old).

I'm under no illusion that my sd card is going to be around 5-10 years from now... anymore than I thought my cd's were going to last very long long either... It was pointed out back then when we were burning them. The anticipated life was something like 10-15 years.

Cd's when the average HD was 100 mb... Now we're into TB, and even the 8gb dldvd can't cut it. A bit difficult to tell everyone to go buy a raid hd system for backups...

To this day I express that prof. photographers need to get me 100 dpi 1/3rd size. A 12' high hauler, and they all say 'no problem'. I then get a 30" high 300 dpi image which is 90" and not the 144" I need... Well it works for billboards... yes. yes it does.
Except the guy who paid for the billboard isn't sitting 5' from it... which is what sponsors do when they eat lunch next to a race hauler.

20 years ago few heard of the internet. Nowadays everyone has a 'computer room'. Which is why I felt your advice was good. Many with a computer room may not realize their backups from 20 years ago are no longer good.
So yes... if they ant to create backups on sd card to last another 20 years? That's not a good choice...
They should backup often... keep your last few backups, and keep up with media changes... cuz next year there will be a new media to backup to.

 

[K_W]

Manuf. of sd cards is hit and miss as I've learned. if my card fails, I usually notice during the backup (local media is good), or I have a backup (1-4 weeks old), plus dvd backups (3-6 months old).

I'm under no illusion that my sd card is going to be around 5-10 years from now... anymore than I thought my cd's were going to last very long long either... It was pointed out back then when we were burning them. The anticipated life was something like 10-15 years.

Cd's when the average HD was 100 mb... Now we're into TB, and even the 8gb dldvd can't cut it. A bit difficult to tell everyone to go buy a raid hd system for backups...

To this day I express that prof. photographers need to get me 100 dpi 1/3rd size. A 12' high hauler, and they all say 'no problem'. I then get a 30" high 300 dpi image which is 90" and not the 144" I need... Well it works for billboards... yes. yes it does.
Except the guy who paid for the billboard isn't sitting 5' from it... which is what sponsors do when they eat lunch next to a race hauler.

20 years ago few heard of the internet. Nowadays everyone has a 'computer room'. Which is why I felt your advice was good. Many with a computer room may not realize their backups from 20 years ago are no longer good.
So yes... if they ant to create backups on sd card to last another 20 years? That's not a good choice...
They should backup often... keep your last few backups, and keep up with media changes... cuz next year there will be a new media to backup to.

We had the same bottlenecks before... 93 to 95 until ZIP and cheap tape drives... 96-98 with multi GB drives until CD-R's were affordable... and again around 2003 to 2005 when 40+ GB Hard drives appeared, then DVD burners became affordable.

BD-R is up to 100GB+ now, although compatibility is limited. Near future optical media is said to reach multi terabyte capacities and will be available in a few years.

Today a simple home RAID NAS and cloud backup services can cover MOST people's backup needs of non-critical or non-sensitive info.

Professionals working with files your size are not quite what I had in mind with this post.

I can remember as a kid I'd install games borrowed from a neighbor, when I'd get a newer used computer to play with I'd have to rotate two 1.44mb floppy disks to copy over all my games, file by file so as to not lose my progress. I'd had to plan ahead by adding up file sizes to fully fill a disk, writing the first disk, reading it in the newer machine while filling the second disk, and then back to write them over again and again, back and forth. It would take nearly an hour just to copy the 16 MB that made up DooM II... I kinda miss the sound of two disk drives in stereo.

I though I was in heaven when all my stuff fit on ONE CD-R.

 

[oldpink]

[...]
I can remember as a kid I'd install games borrowed from a neighbor, when I'd get a newer used computer to play with I'd have to rotate two 1.44mb floppy disks to copy over all my games, file by file so as to not lose my progress. I'd had to plan ahead by adding up file sizes to fully fill a disk, writing the first disk, reading it in the newer machine while filling the second disk, and then back to write them over again and again, back and forth. It would take nearly an hour just to copy the 16 MB that made up DooM II... I kinda miss the sound of two disk drives in stereo.

I though I was in heaven when all my stuff fit on ONE CD-R.

Don't leave out that not only were floppy disks incredibly slow and low capacity, but they were incredibly unreliable.
I couldn't even begin to count the times that I would buy a brand new box of high quality diskettes (Maxell or Verbatim), write a paper in Wordperfect 5.1 (remember that?), save to my brand new diskette, storing it carefully and well away from any magnetism, only for the exact same diskette to have multiple bad sectors when I later tried to make edits, with the original document destroyed.
Youngsters of today don't realize just how good they have it when they can have an SDHC card the size of a postage stamp or a MicroSDHC card the size of a pinky fingernail that holds 32GB, read and writes thousands of times faster, has no moving parts, with durability and longevity that likewise smoke the old diskette.
I'm expecting in the not too distant future for a technology to emerge that blows away even the best optical or flash media, especially with regards to longevity and durability.

 

[bigretic]

Even if your data is on USB flash drives or SD cards, they do not last forever. Some estimate USB drives lose data faster than optical (10 yrs). I myself have had nearly new, properly ejected, name brand, store bought, SD cards fail for no known reason.

this ^^^

 

[bwframe]

Isn't the most reliable practice to keep duplicate copies of data on different mediums and in different locations, including the cloud?

 

[cbhausen]

Wow, this thread makes me feel ancient. Been there, done that on so much of this stuff.

 

[GLOCKMAN23C]

Where is my backup tape drive??? Or better yet the stack of 15 floppy disks that I did my last backup on?
Some good advice posted here...I have some CDR's that were burned in the mid '90s, the ones that are still around work well, but I don't trust them.

And for my fellow nerds...

[video=youtube_share;qpMvS1Q1sos]http://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos[/video]

 

[RobbyMaQ]

I've got old cd's that won't read in newer drives just because of the speed rating on them.

 

[jkaetz]

I've got old cd's that won't read in newer drives just because of the speed rating on them.

I made an ISO image of an older CD. When I went to verify it against the disk the CD drive just kept blinking and claiming it wasn't ready. When I removed the disk it had cracks from the center going out into the media. I'm just glad it didn't decide to shatter in the drive. Now I limit the read speed if I'm using older disks.

 

[eldirector]

I've actually moved 99% of my data to a local wireless RAID and the "cloud". It is mostly digital photos and video.

I do have more sensitive data "backed up" on physical media, stored in multiple locations. That information is not part of the local RAID or cloud set.

I moved to this system several years ago, when I had more data than I had time. I simply couldn't burn DVDs cast enough. Hard drive prices / GB have been steadily falling. I've spent the same on a few TB of mirrored RAID recently as my very first stand-alone 8 GB network drive. Cloud storage is also fairly inexpensive.

 

[jkaetz]

I've actually moved 99% of my data to a local wireless RAID and the "cloud". It is mostly digital photos and video.

I do have more sensitive data "backed up" on physical media, stored in multiple locations. That information is not part of the local RAID or cloud set.

I moved to this system several years ago, when I had more data than I had time. I simply couldn't burn DVDs cast enough. Hard drive prices / GB have been steadily falling. I've spent the same on a few TB of mirrored RAID recently as my very first stand-alone 8 GB network drive. Cloud storage is also fairly inexpensive.

This is a perfectly valid solution. If you want to maintain things on spinning disk, just develop a life cycle for replacing them and you should be well protected against data loss. Yes you could still loose it in a flood or fire so you should still do an offsite backup but it sounds like you've already done that.

Personally I have a three to four year life cycle before I replace/upgrade my spinning disks and migrate the data. This usually involves increasing my available storage and getting new hardware. I also have an offsite copy of the most important things.

 

[ws6guy]

What cloud storage are you guys using? Recently my PC decided to crash but fortunately before hand I backed up all recent pictures and such. I usually do the back up to DVD once or twice a year. The issue had this time is that I have probably 40+ CD-R and DVD-R disks to put the data back on the the PC. This took several evenings of loading data back onto the PC, some disks would read for a minute or two then lock up the DVD drive, then I would have to start over with that disk. Possibly issues with some of the disks being 15-20 years old, never knew they could go bad. Anyway this is just too time consuming. I'm still kind of weary of the "cloud" but realize it should be a very easy option. My main concern is backing up pictures and video.

 

[jkaetz]

What cloud storage are you guys using? Recently my PC decided to crash but fortunately before hand I backed up all recent pictures and such. I usually do the back up to DVD once or twice a year. The issue had this time is that I have probably 40+ CD-R and DVD-R disks to put the data back on the the PC. This took several evenings of loading data back onto the PC, some disks would read for a minute or two then lock up the DVD drive, then I would have to start over with that disk. Possibly issues with some of the disks being 15-20 years old, never knew they could go bad. Anyway this is just too time consuming. I'm still kind of weary of the "cloud" but realize it should be a very easy option. My main concern is backing up pictures and video.

You have lots of options from the very simple of dropbox, google drive, and onedrive, to the purpose marketed disaster recovery solutions of carbonite, crashplan, and acronis. Google Photo will let you store unlimited photo and video if you stay within their resolution requirements and I'm sure you can find other options. Bottom line is that you would have to see which solution works best for your needs and budget.

 

[eldirector]

I've been using Microsoft OneDrive for non-sensitive cloud storage. I have 1TB+ as part of my Microsoft account. Yes, I've bought into the whole "subscription" thing. For me, it works. And, I gotta say, it is the easiest config I've ever had. My phone syncs pics/video straight to the cloud (no computer needed). OneDrive is also mirrored on my laptop, which is in turn backed up to my network storage. Technically, I have 4 copies of this stuff: phone, laptop, OneDrive, and network backup (which, is mirrored as well).

I do the same thing at work, with our Corporate OneDrive account. Everything I care about is in OneDrive, which is mirrored locally. We then have some sort of enterprise backup system that backs it all up to the corp network. When my work laptop "releases the magic smoke", I simply log in to my corp account from another device, and carry on as if nothing happened. When a new laptop shows up, reinstall apps, log back in, and I'm back in business.