The darker the media the faster it tends to die. I have CD-ROMs going back to the very early days of CDs. They tend to survive longer than DVDs burned later.
I have been copying all my CD-ROMS and burned DVDs to hard drives. (BTRFS with file duplication.)
I’ve recently purged dozens of spindles of dvd-r that were no longer readable. the stuff they make those out of doesn’t last at all.
Stuff about CD rot goes back to at least 1999. Here’s a blog post by someone I know (new) where he talks about it…
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/General/CDRot/CDRot.html
1999 BTW is the earliest version of that page that archive.org has.
Different dyes. The darkness of the dye isn’t actually relevant, it’s how UV reactive it is.
Cyanine dye is very unstable in UV light. Phthalocyanine dye is relatively stable, but needs a good quality drive to burn an archive quality disc, and Azo dye is even more stable.
Different disc manufacturers are also of varying quality, and the brand of the disc is not always the same as the manufacturer.
You see those dystopian SF stories about all human knowledge lost and you think “how could have happened”. This is how it happens.
And I can personally say that I have a few CD’s from the 80’s (Dog Eat Dog by Joni Mitchell) that are unplayable due to rot…that one you can actually see a hole in the foil.
I had that happen to one CD that I liked. It was what got me to archive all my CDs to FLAC in the first place.
Recently translated cuneiform script from 4600-year-old tablet:
“Your old Sumerian tablets are probably rotting”
I suspect there is evidence to suggest that storing CDs on a spindle will submit them to uneven pressures and cause warping, whereas a CD stored in a case, clamped solely at its center, may have greater longevity. Adhesive labels can cause similar problems, apparently.
[quote=“SamWinston, post:45, topic:96810”]You see those dystopian SF stories about all human knowledge lost and you think “how could have happened”. This is how it happens.[/quote]I quite like this one, personally:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html
i know right? all my discs had holes in the middle! 
the failure rate did subjectively seem higher then my binders, but even those were abysmal.
to be fair, i typically would buy cases of whatever 100 disc spindles were on sale at the time, the cheap stuff seems especially bad, up to 90% failure rate on 10 yr old discs.
discs stored in the dark seem to fair a bit better. there seems to be some light, if i had to guess uv, degradation around the outsides of discs stored in spindles.
ironically i recently pulled data off of some 3.5 hd floppies twice that age and they were mostly fine, a few places required multiple passes to read, but as far as i can tell the data is intact.
Still being read today.
The oldest known cave art is from Spain, believed to be about 40,800 years old.
i like the thought, blank cave media is just so pricey these days.
Especially if they got the linen from some rubbish old Egyptian mummies.
The top two are aboriginal art from Australia. The kangaroo x-ray style is a giveaway.
/pedant
. . I figured someone would call me out on that !
The bottom one though is Spanish; but the pages were so confusing that I’m not sure if it’s the 408-century-old one?
Enduring is one thing. Retaining meaning is quite another. There’s something to be said for rotting as a transition to something potentially better. Or so one might infer from the classic archaeology parody Motel of the Mysteries.
Fahrenheit (give or take) 250° ?
aka Seedy-ROM
That works out to be around 6° of Kevin.
hit single name
