CD-R burnout

Not exactly an old wive's tale, but far from the truth. Many of mine are more than 5 years old and I've never had one go bad. But I do treat them with respect. Some CDRs are promoted as "archival" discs with hundred-year lifespans. In any event, I'd rate their survival chances better than that of mag tape -- some of my mag tapes ARE unplayable.

Hello Sid 42. I have reading this type of thing since the CD was invented. I think that there was a lot of variability in CD quality in the early days. Perhaps today too. As a result, deterioration has been observed. However, it may be that it was due to manufacturing and material quality more than any inherent deterioration. The best answer you may get at the moment is that nobody knows for sure whether CD's last "forever" because CD's haven't been around "forever".

I am not in the position to dispute the opinions of physicists and engineers who know more than me about such things. However, it is certainly true that poor environmental storage conditions will deteriorate anything eventually, including magnetic tape, so maybe a backup every once in a while wouldn't hurt, especially now that storage is inexpensive. I do not understand what difference a 7200 rpm hard drive makes, as opposed to 5400 rpm. As Nsgarch has suggested, you might want to keep your CDs away from extreme heat (or children with pointy objects). CDs can certainly melt or be physically damaged. I would also keep them out of direct sunlight since UV radiation does funny things to plastic type material.

I have Cd's from the mid-80's that are disintregrating. Here are some fun articles:

http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=553612004

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/bronzed.asp

Also a lot of cheap CD-R's have extremely thin protective layers over the data layer and so must be handled with extreme care.

There are several types of CD-Rs available, and the differences have to do with the type of organic "dye" used on the side which has the data written to it. Indeed, there are many cheap CD-Rs that will only last a couple of years before the dye, which has been burned into a series of "bump" and "no bump" areas, begins to lose it's integrity. The disc becomes difficult for the player mechanism to follow and eventually becomes untrackable. Some say that the degradation can be delayed by storing discs in a horizontal position, that probably helps but does not address the real issue.

However, all CD-Rs are not as subject to that problem. Most people purchase the "low bid" CD-R, which is why there are so many of them around, but there are significant differences in the products from various vendors. To really keep your music / pictures / data etc. intact it would be wise to purchase CD-R product from either Mitsui or Taio Yuden. These companies were the pioneers in organic dye used to make CD-Rs and they have done accelerated life testing on their discs. The blank discs are not cheap, and most consumer stores do not carry them, but they can be found online and from several pro-audio supply houses.

My experience with trying to preserve various kinds of digital data over the last 20 years or so is that the problem is almost always the obsolescence of the player, or the interface between the player and the output device, rather than the longevity of the medium. First there were floppies, then tape, then Syquest drives, then CD's, now DVD's and terabyte hard drives, probably some kind of solid-state memory is next, who knows?

We'll have to keep herding the bits from one medium to another as long as long as technology keeps changing, which means forever, and if you screw up and forget to transfer something it will wind up sitting on your shelf, perfectly intact, with no place to go.