It do be like that

I accidentally left a CD with a bunch of photos on it from 2005 in a shed outside until 2022 and when I mounted it, it ran great. I got back a bunch of photos from 2005 that I thought were lost. That shed gets hot as fuck during summer and then our Maine winters as famously harsh.

I was surprised the weather didn't kill the CD so as an experiment I burned a bunch of memes onto a CD and buried it in a plastic food container. I let it stay there a year and allowed the deep frost of winter to get to it. I dug it up a year later and it was fine.

So this is just a sample size of 2 but to me it seems normal everyday CDs are actually pretty tough and stable, even through brutal temperature changes and wet or frozen weather.

They rot?

Yep. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

You technically don't own games. You own a license to play them. This has always been the case going back at least to the 80s if not before (first time I noticed this was Dr. Mario on the NES when reading the manual as I'd just learned how to read). If your disc is ruined you can contact them for a replacement disc since your license was not destroyed or forfeited. This is also why you are legally permitted to make one backup copy. Saves them from having to do the replacement themselves.

Fun fact about cd, over half of the data present on a common cd is used for error correction and because of that it's still readable normally even in case of it having several sections significantly damaged.

I stored a cd R in a closet since 2004. It was sandwiched in a book for 2 years. I got curious and read it. All the files were there perfect. I copied the information and burned it to a Mdisc blue ray. In the mean time, I lost several gigs over the years from hard drive failures. One was internal of a laptop. Very unexpected. Another was an external harddrive.

That's what happens when you don't have parity and backups. It'll happen to your optical media too, just give it a few years

When your frigging C64 5 1/4" disks keep their data for longer than relative modern DVDs...

I have 35 year old cd's that still work fine that sat in a unclime controlled 4 season garage

both burnt and retail

I'm at a loss, I have tons of old CDs, none have "rotted" and I definitely didn't do anything in terms of preservation.

Just wait until we can access our DNA

we kinda can, but the throughput is awful
- There's only one legal gene therapy here, I reckon it'll be some years before we're allowed more
I can access it just fine. I just can't read it.
It's just junk, it's fine.

That looks like mold 😮reminds me og back in the days when a friend lent a cd to another friend. When he got it back it looked like it was used to eat dinner on.

Cant remember of the cd still worked.

Disc rot is so overblown I'm genuinely convinced companies are influencing discussion around it to scare people away from optical media.

In the, probably near 1000, discs I own

I have one with rot, and that's a CD manufactured in a specific plant, within a specific timeframe known (for decades now) to have had issues.

So it's not as if it's a random occurrence which has caused that disc to fail, but posts like this always seem to push the idea that "your disc could just die at any time bro" and it's simply not true.

For the last 5-8 years I only use game disks to make images out of them.

That said I have games that are 20 years old and I just keep them in normal boxes as well as jewel cases / paper sleeves and I never had a problem with a single disk going bad in any way.

I do plan to purchase a couple anti moisture gel packets and throw them into my wardrobe and boxes where I store stuff for the ease of mind :p

This pops into my head everytime Mutahar goes on one of his “preservation rants.” My guy I do not care if the game gets deleted, it will be backed up digitally if it’s worth backing up.

When you pirate an entire console's library at once but then are like "Oh no it's okay if I say it's preservation first"
- Me when I acquire an entire romset for the Turbografix-16

For those with large collections of optical media, the Council on Library and Information Resources published a guide titled Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, which provides some good info on safeguarding said collections.

The one intelligent response in the whole thread.

Back in the day Blizzard replaced my Warcraft II disc. Too bad they're shit now.

Omg me too! It exploded in my cd drive.

Codex are doing the real game preservation nowadays

What's the consensus as far as BD-R discs go? Does the coating help them last longer?

I'm pretty sure.

Really makes me wonder what on earth kind of place this was stored in

a toilet

Also good luck when you loose the key

Lose.

You said you didn’t make a copy of ISO?

That thing was used as a drink coaster

True back up is with LTO.

I've dd copied all my playstation 2 disks to a NAS, because they were getting old. Running those games on the ps2 off an external disk is a lot more effort than just putting the disc in though, so they are still my main goto

On the bright side, that would make it accessible by emulators, allowing you and whoever you give access to it, to play it from anywhere. Even with an android
- The future is now

All my disks are imaged and the images are all I ever interact with. I only keep the physical disks as extra backups now. Gave up on the idea of "collecting" after facing the reality that packaging starts to disintegrate after a couple of decades, not to mention disk rot.

God, it hurts to see that CD. I remember when I was a kid, I had PS1 games that my uncle recorded into CDs and some of the time they would get spots all over.

One of my current DVD-RW discs (for live CDs) has disc rot on the edges. It's the only one with the issue. I wonder what really causes it, aside from humidity in the ambient.

Looks like a recordable disc that has gone bad. Pressed CDs, DVDs and BDs should last a pretty long while.

Wrap a box in aluminum foil -bam= Faraday cage on the cheap

Happy cake day!
Try wrapping your phone in aluminum foil and running a speed test. You'll find that modern radios have plenty of SNR to spare

Freepsxboot and verbatim cd-r with burner

This picture gives me severe anxiety

To comfort you, this CD appears to be an empty disc which was either under water for a long period of time or forgotten in a basement or similar. No data was lost probably as it was empty to begin with.

Still better than relying to a third party server that can and will eventually shutdown and not let you download your licensed data anymore.

So far steam has been around way longer than the average lifespan of dvds and you can still share your game license with a friend
- That's true. In fact is the only storefront I am trusting. I do all my gaming on Nintendo DS/3DS (cartriges) or Steam Deck
Not to mention being completely at the mercy of forced updates which can ruin your favorite game at any moment. People bitch about having to install from disks and patch manually, but I value that freedom and control.
For example, for me, Company of Heroes peaked at 1.71. This is fine because I simply install it from disk, apply the two patches required to get it to 1.71, and play the game exactly how I like it forever. I wish I could do the same thing with some modern games, which have been ruined by developers who don't know when to stop tinkering with their work.
Only GOG seems to be allowing for the old way of installation for new triple-A releases. I'll never be forced to install any particular version of The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 because I have the offline installers and all the incremental patches saved.

Yeah no shit, nothing lasts forever. Doesn't stop me from preserving everything as best as I can tho.

"the game servers will eventually shut down" my brother in Christ, the sun will eventually shut down
- “I’ll be dead by then, not my problem”

I have never seen a factory pressed CD/DVD fail. Optical media is the most reliable.

There was an issue with discs made by the PDO pressing plant in the UK between 89 and 93 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_bronzing
Oddly enough there is a specific album, live's secret samadhi, that I've never found a rippable copy of. I've found like five copies over the past half decade at used record stores, all in seemingly perfect condition in terms of lack of scratches, but they won't play correctly all the way through or rip correctly. Could be anecdotal bad luck, but I think the cd pressing of that album has bit rot in general for some reason. I've not seen that on any other factory discs I've ripped.
- If it is the same album always, all of the copies were probably manufactured cheaply or deficiently.
I've had one (extremely cheap) pressed DVD start to separate, but I was able to archive it before it became unreadable.
Indeed. My oldest music CD is from about 1991. Still playing it from time to time. Flawless.
I bought a CD boxset of all the MAD Magazine issues from launch until the late 90s (when I bought it). About 8 years later I still had it and attempted to back it up into ISOs It was like 6 discs and of course disc 5 was unreadable so the entire thing was useless :-/
- Hmm, there might be some procedures to help you to get them backed up to ISOs, even if they seem unreadable. What program did you try to use to make the ISOs?
i have multiple wii u discs that dont work
I've seen it, but I collect a lot of magazine cover discs, 90s PC games and stuff, it's def pretty darn rare. 'Did the previous owner(s) abuse the disc?' is a vastly higher concern for me in my eBay adventures.
- I do have two magazine discs that I had trouble reading that were probably rotting, but they were definitely left in the sun for a long while judging by how brown they where, that or they were put inside an oven.

aye same thing happened to my car i supposedly would be able to own forever. I left it out in the yard for ten years and now it looks like something bonnie and clyde got shot to death in.

Just download a new one
- I would never download a car or shoot a policeman.
Back. Up. Your. Car.
One is none. Two is one blahblahblah

You own the game forever so do protect it yourself.

thats why i dont bother about collecting games anymore XD

I am a big believer that physical media is dead and there is no reason to have it anymore. This is one of them.

Then I realized that I cannot stream the movie "dogma" anywhere outside of Kodi. My wife and I tried to rent/buy it on Prime the other night and its not available anywhere

Maybe there is no true way to store anything.
I want to get into preservation but it sounds like every way has problems.
Idk where to start anymore. I thought Blu ray was the way.
Looks like physical media has a role.
- Oh it's available online you just aren't looking hard enough Matey!

Greentext is reductive, but at the same time DVDs and optical media in general are a paradox. In theory, they will last forever, but at the same time there are so many ways to fuck up with them that they're basically only good as like a plan Z storage for really important files that you wrap in cardboard and leave in the closet.

rookie mistake :3

I recently tried to read a small number of 30+ year-old floppy disks containing code I wrote for the Atari ST and they're all unreadable. The disk surface is noticably degraded.

A mix of buying cheap disks, using non-standard formats to prioritise space over reliability, and waiting too long to duplicate the data.

Lesson learned.

seriously though, if your discs look like this, you're doing an extremely poor job looking after them

you can also, like, keep them in a humidity-free environment and, you know, back them up. Which you can't do with call-home, DRM'd download-only digital copies.

wii u disc moment

out of the literal hundreds of discs i've seen from my own home(s), friends, family, and thrift stores, i have not oncw, not ever seen real disc rot with my own eyes. i wouldn't know about it if the internet wasn't a thing. it's so weird to use disc rot as a argument against optical. might as well use getting struck by lightning as a excuse to never go outside. what conditions need to be met for this kind of rot to occur?

Where the hell was this disk kept? Last time I saw one like this it was an AOL Starter Disc I found during spring cleanup a couple years ago. God knows how many freeze and thaw cycles that thing had gone through but it was version 5.0 so we're talking at least 20 years outside.