On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 17:58 -0800, Ken Pergola (sent by Nabble.com)
wrote:
> Obviously no one has a 20- or 30-year old CD-R yet...so there is a lot of speculation out there with regard to shelf-life. I can't believe, and have personally disproved through my own experience with CD-Rs, some of the claims made in that article. I really would like to have seen some data to back up those statements.
> 
> The oldest CD-R that I own is a Kodak PhotoCD disc that was professionally produced in September of 1995. After over 10 years, it is still readable. According to the above article, it shouldn't be. I purchased my first CD burner in late 1997. I have numerous CD-Rs burned in 1998 that are still readable.
> 
> I'd be interesting to hear if anyone out there has a CD-R older than 10 years and whether anyone has had any of their CD-Rs disc rendered unreadable under "normal" circumstances through the passage of time.
> 
> I've also read claims (not in that story listed above) that virgin CD-Rs have a shelf-life, but I have virgin CD-Rs that are over 5 years old that can still be recorded to.

About a year ago I cleaned up some stuff and decided to burn the
contents of all my CDRs to DVD. None more then around 5 years old had
any useful data on them. Note that these had been burned by many
different burners, were of many different brands, and were properly
stored. Oh, and reading the CDRs was tried with three different machine,
spanning two OSs.

CDRs newer then 5 years were in better shape, all newer then 2 years
were perfectly fine, those between 2 and 5 years varied, some had some
useful data, others almost completely fine, others almost completely
gone.

I did tend to notice a few things, mostly the "green" ones faired worse
then the "clear" ones, and name brands tended to be a little better, but
not by much.

All the CDRs in question contained data that wasn't very important (all
my important data has always been backed up in multiple ways on multiple
media), but I was most certainly surprised at how BAD it had gotten.

To that day I had personally doubted the claims people had been making
about longevity of CDR media. Obviously my opinion is vastly different
these days.

Obviously newer writtable media is still an unknown, personally I won't
trust any -R media beyond about a year if the data is valuable to me.

TTYL

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