I know people just say “Archive and copy” all your digital media.
But that sets up a scenario where it’s dependent on your children, and your children’s children, and their children. To constantly update and archive and copy the family media.
Instead of just putting the pictures in a shoe box that will last a century or more.
All those VHS family movies. Did you move them to DVD? Well that DVD is going to rot…so you move them to a HD, and that HD is going to rot…So you move them to SSD…etc…etc…
Entirely anecdotal, but at the point where I was using both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, I find the 5.25" inch kind less likely to die in me. (Possibly because they actually flexed?)
(Nowadays, repeated experience with students shows me that 3.5" floppy disquettes are much more vulnerable to data loss, mostly due to being carried in bags with mobile phones…)
Gold Discs? not if you bought any manufactured by PDO in 88-93. those things bronzed like nobody’s business. i lost quite a few Current 93 and Death In June albums due to rot.
For CDr discs… if it matters to you, spend the money and use Mitsui. Just about every archivist I know uses them.
Some Frenchman built a device which will convert sound to a drawing on paper back in the 1850’s, the idea being “Eventually somebody will figure out a way to play this”, and we did in 2008.
Aside from the media itself, there are many other things to consider. A lot of data is sitting around in proprietary old formats, created by old software that can no longer be easily obtained and which no modern system can run. Sure, now we have systems powerful enough to run emulators of most older systems, but in addition to the emulator you also need the old software, some way to get the data off the old hardware, (how do you hook up a parallel port zip disk to a modern PC and let the emulator access it?), some way to get the data out of the emulator and into the modern system, and some way to convert it to a modern format.
Media (CD/DVD or other) is only a small part of the picture.
That said, I was recently able to find and modify the source code of an old C program and find an old compiler that would still run to recompile it so it could read its old data files and spit the data out as JSON that any modern system could parse. That’s a lot more effort than just sticking a disk in a drive though, and required a lot of luck.
In another case, I managed to reverse-engineer an obscure old data format from the '80s to port hundreds of files forward, but that was again largely luck and having the time and curiosity to explore and experiment with it.
Point is, we have to keep porting data forward to newer and more open formats or they will be lost regardless of the media.
Whenever I store something long term on CD-R or DVD-R I always compress it in WinRAR and add the recovery feature. People (especially the 7Zip crowd) loves to poop all over WinRAR because it’s ancient, yet it’s one of the few compression/archiving programs that offers a good recovery feature. I usually set it around 3-5% and have had it successfully work on more than one occasion when I get read errors on copy. Sure you are adding overhead to your data, but how important is it to you in the first place?
For esoteric compression/archiving programs I was always partial to a program called UC2 (Ultra Compressor 2). It had practically every feature you needed, was better at compression than anything at the time (probably as good as 7Zip) and had recover capability. Sadly it was privately developed program that ended in 96…so you know the last update was adding things like long file name support…
For the myriad of binary formats, with things like 48-bit floating point types that were unique to one brand’s compiler, that might not be quite enough. Another thing I thought of - my early disks were overformatted using some utility I don’t even remember the name of; even with no bitrot, they’d be unreadable. In some cases they were encrypted using a passcode I would have forgotten 20 years ago, but that’s another issue.
Good point though - unix has lots of utilities that can be strung together to pluck out data, treat it as tables/columns/etc., and process it in various ways. Great if you’re dealing with some old delimited or flat-format fixed-width text files.
A lot of the weaknesses of the CD (easily scratched, UV damages) would have been solved if they made it in a case, like floppy disks.
But they didn’t want to make a robust media, they wanted a cheap one.
We got 1850’s rickrolled…