Say Goodbye To Your CD-Rs In Two Years?

Little Hamster writes "According to an article on cdfreaks.com, a test done by the Dutch PC-Active magazine showed that among 30 different CD-R brands tested, a lot of them were already unreadable after twenty months. This is shocking, and makes me wonder how should I backup my data, photo and music collection."

but something is missing...

[KingRamsis]

the speed in which the CDR is burned sometimes it makes a difference, for the highest reliability I think 1x is the best.

BAckup to CD-Rs? Use HD's instead

[-noefordeg-]

Just backup to harddrives.

I'm using Araid99-1000 [synetic.net] units in my computers, and backup is just replacing the slave drive (even while the computer is on and running).

The price for say, WD120mb drives are so cheap now that it is probably close to the cheapest, safest and most accessable backup format available.

harddisk rack back-up

[Ragnagnor]

Just do what I do : buy a rack, install in front of your machine (under the DVD or CD-RW or somewhere) and back up all your important data (or your entire harddrive) to a separate harddisk. Prices on smaller models (40-60 gigs) aren't all that steep, and most people I know have trouble just filling up their 'small' 20 or 30 gig drives. A spare 60 gigger rackdisk will keep you satifsied for a long time... Alternatively you could also just buy an external fire-wire or USB harddisk, although I don't really have all that much experience with those kind of devices.

Easy backups

[glesga_kiss]

Simply buy twice the number of drives you need, and do an rsync between the two sets now and again. For added safety, get a friend with broadband and store the second box there. Then you are safe from fire, theft, drive crashes etc, with minimal effort to keep the backup up to date.

Storage conditions?

[T-Kir]

I've got a whole load of burned CD's that I created up to about 5 years ago.. and on varying quality of media, and a lot of them aren't any problem.

I suppose storage is the key thing, keep them in a dark cool place will help them last just that bit longer (unless you have a case of those little bugs that like eating the data layer).

Although they are of a similar tech, what about DVD recordable disks? I've got plenty of those now... but if I keep doing what i've been doing over the years and backup my backups onto newer media then I'm not too worried.

Just my $0.02

Take care of 'em

[munch0wnsy0u]

This article is quite inconclusive in my mind. There is nothing in it that describes the care given to the cds for the past 20 months (what cases, if any, they were in, the amount of light and heat they were exposed to, etc.) Also, there was no mention of the quality of the media they were burned on, nor the speed at which they were burned. Too many variables are introduced in the article to fairly say that cd media is not a viable backup alternative. It seems like decent advice to burn slowly and simply take care of your cds, they would last much longer.

Save it to Film

[notestein]

Save it to film. [kodak.com]

Don't take it too seriously

[tgv]

The online summary of the article says literally: "Uit onze steekproef blijkt dat er veel rommel op de markt is. We hebben cd-r's aangetroffen die nooit op de markt hadden mogen komen. Het gaat daarbij mogelijk om afgedankte partijen."

Or, rather literally translated into English: "Our sample shows that there is a lot of junk on the market. We have found cd-rs that should never have been for sale. Possibly it concerns rejected batches." Which suggests to me that the correct heading of this article should be: CD-Rs are like everything else: you get what you pay for.

A little history...

[technix4beos]

Back in the eighties, when regular CD's were first introduced that could be read by a standard computer (pc, mac, etc), the discs were fairly thick, and consisted of (iirc) from top down:

disc label
protective coating
data layer (usually pressed)
protective coating

Then at the end of the eighties, I don't recall exactly what year, but it was adopted by various cd makers till eventually all, the price of CD's dropped dramatically, almost in half.

The reason for this was the fact that the top protective layer was removed from the manufacturing process, leaving just the thin disc label and it's material to protect the data layer, barely.

I want to clarify that I'm talking about regular PRESSED cd's manufactured in bulk, and not dye layered ones, but the point is the same in both cases. By removing the top protective layer, it allowed manufacturing of CD's to drop in price dramatically.

I'm positive there have been other cost cutting measures used for dye layer CD's that the manufacturers have adopted over the years, such as cheper dyes that are affected faster due to exposure to sunlight, and so on.

It's not just about scratches or dye, but about the overall picture here. The manufacturers WANT to have built in obselesance. This gives them a nice steady flow of income when one has to contually burn his media archive every 2 years.

Food for thought anyhow. I thought I'd post about what I saw in the eighties, in case it was relevant.

CD = Inferior Storage Technology

[Arbogast_II]

The CD is an inferior storage technology that has propagated due to 3 reasons IMO.

1. For the average person, a file is in some way less real if it is on a hard drive, and more real if it is on a CD, where it is a physical object they can touch.
2. Familiarity with CD's due to long term use on music CDs.
3. Vastly superior marketing to hard drives.

Removable hard drive bays should be standard on all PC's. Once you are used to these, the Hard Drive is just a Cartidge to plug into the PC. Data is easily backed up, and a Hard Drive in closet is safe.

Hard drives are faster, take up less space, and are very cost competative with CD's. I am unclear why CD's are popular with the tech savvy crowd. It's an inferior storage technology.

Re:CD life

[gorimp]

People have already posted they've had write-once CDR media last for years; I myself have media I created nearly a decade ago which doesn't show any (obvious) signs of degradation; admittedly I can't see in that cool color spectragraph they've produced (how did they make that, anyway?).

The only problem I've observed over the last few years is problems between CDR hardware vendors. People bring me something they've burned on their new 52 speed writer and it only works on their reading hardware (or, more accurately, doesn't work in mine ;) but my original 2^2 writer still works everywhere, including DVD players and portables (and, more importantly, on other peoples DVD players and portables). My own experience suggests that the burner is the more important factor then the media -- you can spot bad media right away because you start producing coasters at a higher rate.

If the price for faster burns or newer vendor equipment is a short(er) media shelf life, I'll stick with my original stuff and grow a beard instead.

"Please discuss this subject in our Media Forum."

Re:but something is missing...

[KingRamsis]

You can do the experiment, but you will need a cheap-o-media try burning at 1x and then at the maximum your CDR drive can handle, and try it on a variety of CD-ROM drives, the odds that the 1x copy will be readable on more drives.
I still have a SONY CDR burned at 1x in 1997 ! and still works just fine. (but useless old software anyway)

Re:but something is missing...

[FirstOne]

"But something is missing, The speed in which the CDR is burned sometimes it makes a difference, for the highest reliability I think 1x is the best."

I agree.. Slower recording speeds will usually improve the contrast ratio of the resulting recording.
One can confirm this by making several cd-r's writing at different speeds using the same type of media, and then visually comparing the cd-r's data surfaces, (For recorded areas, Darker is better).

A fair number of CD recording programs DO NOT have a VERIFY cd-r contents option after a burning, and is a major pain in the ass. This problem got me good when I used some 12x Office Depot media for saving some TV show mpegs. Bad move,
I found out months later, that 50% of initial recordings had one or more non recoverable bad spots. :-(

Nero is the only mastering program I know of, which will verify cd-r contents after burning :-),
But it doesn't do it for all recording formats :-( .

dead cds - try to recover them

[lethalwp]

Same experience here, some brands sometimes don't pass the year alive!

To try to recover the most of possible from cds (in data mode only), i have written a little shell script, basically it reads byte per byte (i know i should use blocks of 2048 but that was complicating the rest), if it fails on a reader, it asks you to put the cd in another one, etc

Some readers can read parts of damaged/old cds better than others etc... 2 cd readers required!

here is the link to the script:
http://lethalwp.dyndns.org/~lethalwp/file s/recover cd.sh
(suppress the space /. inserts, if any) :)

i won't update the script any further.

Re:Blah, physical backups

[jetmarc]

+Funny, yes. But it might actually work when you embed the data into real pictures/movies. The technique of embedding is known as "steganography", and sometimes also as "digital watermark".

Scramdisk was an open source program to create encrypted containers (mount as driveletter in windows) in .WAV files. You could choose to use only the lower 4 bits (WAV 4x as large as hidden data) or the lower 8 bits (WAV 2x as large as data).

Be the first to post a FLAC (lossles audio compressor) of the next hot EMINEM album, with some 200 MB of your personal encrypted backup hidden in it, and your backup will live forever!

Marc

Re:simple

[LostCluster]

Do a full backup once a year and a 20 month lifespan for the media doesn't matter...

Re:CD = Inferior Storage Technology

[Idarubicin]

Hard drives are faster, take up less space, and are very cost competative with CD's. I am unclear why CD's are popular with the tech savvy crowd. It's an inferior storage technology.

I can put a CD in its jewel case, then drop it off a desk and on to a concrete floor--and I can expect the data to still be intact.

Hard drives are impact sensitive, and still prone to failure after a year or two.

Also, if I need to move a file from point A to point B CDs are convenient and lightweight--everybody has a CD-ROM drove. Subsequent to that, many people prefer to make backups to CDs because they are a technology that they already have installed for other reasons. Rhetorical question by hypothetical individual: Why would I go to the trouble and expense of another backup method when I already have a CD burner?

Bad CDs also make excellent coasters.

error stats

[xyote]

SCSI tape drives, most of them, even the low end ones, always had a way of reading the error statistics for tape reads and writes. So in theory, because no tape software actually uses this info, you could get advance warning that a particular tape was deteriorating before you got to the point of non-recoverable errors.

I suspect that CD drives also have this capability, just that software doesn't bother to use that info. Actually, most software doesn't even appear to check for non-recoverable errors so I suppose it's being consistent.

Re:Unanswered Questions

[Trozy]

And what kind of dye did the CDs use?

I remember when I was first investigating what brand of CD-Rs to buy. I read an article on the differences between the dyes used in CD-Rs.

Don't remember the exact details, but it was something along the lines of the chemical combination used to make CD-Rs with green dye are better for single speed reading (eg. Audio CDs) but didn't last as long. The chemicals used to make the silver/gold dye however were superior for data, and should last somewhere in the order of 20 years. I think blue dye was somewhere in between.

This similar article [cdmediaworld.com] says gold dye CD-Rs have 100 year durability, and the cheaper green ones only have a 10 year life, but have been enhanced to give 20-50 years of service.

Re:Not surprising, and not new

[Anonymous Coward]

This might sound stupid. But what if I sealed the disc with grease, will this protect the media from reacting with atmospheric oxygen.
Later on if I want to remove the grease, which chemicals should I use so I don't damage the disc.

I have 10 year old working CD-Rs

[MoZ-RedShirt]

I still have the two CD-Rs that were included with my first CD recorder I bought about 10 years ago. They are hp brand and were recorded 2x speed. Both are working fine.

Not that there is anything of interest on them of course. At least if you are not interested in Winzip 2.0 or something of similar age. I just keep them out of curiousity how long they will be readable.

RedShirt

Re:You get what you pay for.

[Jonavin]

I haven't had any high quality CDRs go bad on me yet. And by high quality I don't mean your bulk spindles, I mean Mitsui Gold, Tai Yuden, Kodak Gold (no longer produced), Verbatim DatLifePlus (stay away from ValueLifePlus), etc...

To be extra safe, I run two CD-R drives to write two copies of the data to two different brands of CDR medias at the same time. Then I also overlap the data for the next batch -- taking half the data from the previous CD, and adding new data to fill the new one. So that any given data is on no fewer than 4 good qulaity CDRs from two different brands/batches.

I also happen to have the a second drive in my computer (not RAID) dedicated to backups and quick recovery. Then there's also an external Firewire portable HDD that is another copy of the backup. I say you can never have too many backups.

This is how I backup my precious photos. For regular data, all of it fits on one CDR so at least once every month I write a full backup to a CDR. The CDR has got to last at one month right?

As for MP3s... that's what P2P is for.. distributed backups.

Re:Which CD-R(W) brands are worth getting?

[mrjive]

The test I do now (which I learned the hard way from early burning experiences) is to hold the cd-r up to the light. If you can see through it, chances are it won't last. The cheapo bulk disks that have nothing but a silver top are very likely to be the first to flake on you.

Also, keep your burned discs out of direct sunlight and excessive heat, both which will cause the top foil layer to come off. Even quality media will give out on you after exposure to the elements.

Re:but something is missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Error distance" is nonsense. First of all, the turn on and off time for solid state lasers is miniscule. Second, this "error distance" is the same over the entire disc, and the on and off time should be roughly equal, so at worst you would have the pits "skewed" or delayed in relation to the actual input data. So what? The problem with the test was the variability of the the CD blanks. Cheap discs are cheap discs. Don't expect crap to last as long as name-brand media.

Re:Not surprising, and not new

[petrilli]

The other poster is correct. While we did not examine CD-RW, as they didn't really exist at the time, and also violated a rule for archiving for the group we were doing work for, which is that you can change them undetectably, I would imagine they suffer from the same problem as other mediums. Panasonic's phase-change designs were excellent, and substantially more stable than MO-RW, but in the end, they were VERY sensitive to UV, which is why they were in cases that had shutters that had interlocks. CD-RWs don't have this.

panasonic phase change is crap...

[bani]

i *had* several panasonic phase change drives.

the media and technology is shit. period. it died off for good reason.

every single one of the discs died within a year with unrecoverable errors under even light occasional use.

even the crappiest CDR/RW technology I have seen is light years beyond that panasonic phase change crap.

ps i still have the drive and dead media sitting around, if anyone wants to buy it cheap...