What has your experiance been with trying to use DVDs that you burnt 10+ years ago?

[Calavera]

Nowadays with hard drives having such large capacities and small prices nobody really burns DVDs for data storage anymore. But there was a time when it was done quite often. I remember when I had a huge for the time 250GB hard drive. It was sufficient at the time until we got high-speed internet(1.5mbps). After that I began to fill it up very quickly. I wouldn't want to delete stuff so I would burn things to multiple DVD-Rs to free up space. I recall trying some of the discs only a few years later and some of them already had read errors or just flat out couldn't be read at all. I don't know what brand they were, they had a solid white label and were most likely some cheap-o brand.

A couple of days ago I was cleaning out my closet and found the DVD-Rs that I had copied the entire series of Hardcastle and McCormick onto. I burnt these in late 2009. There are 10 of them total and they are the video files burnt onto the disc as data and not as DVD-Video. So these discs have been sitting in my closet for nearly 12 years in their paper sleeves. I remember when I burnt them. I had finished watching all of the episodes and really didn't want to have to delete them but the entire series took up around 40GB which was a pretty big amount at the time.

So anyways I haven't watched Hardcastle and McCormick since 2009 before I burnt the series to DVD. I have more than enough storage in my PC now so I figured I'd copy the files off the DVD onto the computer so I could watch them again. I haven't had an optical drive in my PC for.....I'm not even sure. Over 5 years for sure, probably closer to 10. But I had just picked up a USB Memorex CD/DVD writer for $3 at Goodwill a few weeks ago so I actually have a drive to copy the DVDs from.

As I started I remembered the discs I burnt in the past that had gone bad after only a year or two so I had my doubts that these would be fully readable after 12 years. I just finished copying over disc 10/10. They are all copied over just fine. The discs I used are Maxell brand DVD-R. Here is a picture of what the discs look like.



I never did buy high end discs back then. I just bought whatever was cheap for a 50 or 100 pack. But apparently these Maxell discs are pretty damn good. I am surprised and pleased that they copied over with no issues. Come to think of it I also used alot of Maxell CD-Rs back when I was burning emulators for the Dreamcast. They had a black bottom on them like a PS1 game. I actually still have some of them laying around somewhere out in the pole barn with a bunch of other random old discs. The next time I come across one I need to pop it in and see if it still works. If I still had a Dreamcast I'd try it in their and see if NesterDC would still boot up.

As usual I typed out a super long comment for a simple question but hey that's the Calacera for ya! So what has your experience been with DVDs you burnt 10+ years ago? Are they full of errors or unreadable or do they load up fine with no issues? Are they -R,+R or RW? I'd be interested to know if RW discs (CD or DVD) hold up as well as record once discs. Or did you burn a bunch of discs to back up your data and then never once use them? I have to admit that is the case with the large majority of the discs I burnt back in the day. I still have a big binder full of them somewhere with random old games and software.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I usually bought the cheapest DVDs you could get and most of them still work 15 years later when I try them, which isn't that often.

[ian]

I love optical media.
Most of the discs I've ever burnt are fine. Even the ones stored in a big ass bag that's just a pile of discs that get thrown around still work perfectly.

Only notable problems I've had is a batch of 100 of the cheapest of cheapest of DVD-Rs I got in 2006. I stored them all in a spindle, and most of them were movies, but a few were short term backups of stuff. anyway when sat in the bottom of a wardrobe for 14 years, it turns out the printable label sides stuck to the underside of the next disc and when I went to separate most of them they just ripped off parts of the whole data track. And I've had a lot of TDK CD-Rs that the tops have just rotted away or flaked and cracked off after 20 years.

Recently I've noticed Imation DVD's and CD's are starting to rot around the outside edges even when stored properly, but they've giving fair warning, and replacing the physical media is both easy and cheap.
I have about 20 Sony DVD-RW's that I bought for a DVD recorder way back when, which are all still holding up fine on my current DVD recorder. (Recording things to DVD is just so much easier when people ask for stuff) and a few new old stock DVD RAMs that I bought way back then and never used in another 15 years I'll open them up and see.
And even though my TDK CD-R's are falling apart, the same problem is not affecting my TDK CD-RW's.
My TDK CD-RW's have to be the hardest working optical discs in the world, They've had countless writes, erases and moves, and they were still perfectly readable as of a couple of years ago.

The CD turns 40 next year, and for a 40 year old Technology, it's still the best way to listen to music. (Youtube says you can't have the word CUM, Radio says you can't have FAGGOT, Spotify has more holes in the library than a Sieve and MP3's lose quality)
So even as discs die out on the consumer market, some hold up well, and some fall apart quickly. and it's not always what you think. If the data is important, you shouldn't be relying on a small disc of plastic to reliably store it, even if most of the time, it can reliably store it.

My oldest CD-Rs are nearly 20, and my oldest DVD-Rs are nearly 17. And out of the thousands of them I have, I'd say less than 1% have failed with proper care so far.
DVD's certainly became a lot less relevant than CD's a lot quicker, I've had a current spindle of DVD-Rs last me about 6 years, and it's still half. where as I bought a spindle of CD's last year and it's also at half.

[pixel]

I had a bad habit of not labeling anything back then, so I've found quite a few mystery discs. I still haven't found anything of note though. Most of them were just dupes of Hirem's Boot CD, XP install discs, DiskWarrior, or Xbox modding tools because I was too lazy to find the copy I had last burned. USB media has been a godsend in that regard.

My treasured gem would be to find my mid-aughts iPod backup discs. Can't remember the circumstances why, but my dad took time to burn my iTunes library to a series of DVDs. Most of it is probably at a crunchy 128kbps, but it'd be a good personal history piece.

My original MP3 collection was accidentally deleted some 5-6 years after he made that backup, so it'd be a good approximation of my pre-Spotify music tastes from a decade ago. I still collect a few audio CDs of harder-to-find albums each month and rip FLAC files onto a Plex server, but it's only a fraction of my old pirated collection taken from P2P, college campus iTunes network sharing, and Oink.

It's also been 3-5 years since I've had a functioning optical drive in any of my computers. I bought a cheap external drive when I need to rip audio discs.

[ian]

It's also been 3-5 years since I've had a functioning optical drive in any of my computers. I bought a cheap external drive when I need to rip audio discs.

You'll find that's the case with most people. No one needs burners anymore. In the day to day life of a normal person they became useless when USB sticks got to about 8GB and cost less than $10. Easier, faster loading, more reliable and more versatile.

I'm not normal though, my daily computer will keep an optical drive in it for the foreseeable future, and I have a stack of 20 odd drives here that will keep discs going as long as they survive and get made.
And that's not even mentioning all the old computers I keep around because I like them. I still keep floppies around too just in case I feel like something REALLY old, but floppy disks are so unreliable even when they were brand new, it's nice to have optical discs around.

[pixel]

My favorite part is that my older machine still has a DVD-RW burner, but I stole the molex power years ago for another HDD Never bothered to take the dang thing out

[ian]

My favorite part is that my older machine still has a DVD-RW burner, but I stole the molex power years ago for another HDD Never bothered to take the dang thing out

I've done that before too, a couple of my builds have ODD's in them as ornamental pieces not even plugged in, because they don't look right with a gaping hole in the 5.25" bay, and don't look right with a non colour matched drive in their place.

So I have a Celeron with a busted Lite-on 32X CD ROM drive and a working Sony 24X CD-RW burner.
An Athlon XP with a busted 52X Sony CD-RW and a working Pioneer DVD-RW burner.
And a Pentium 4 with a busted Slot loading Pioneer DVD-ROM and a working Pioneer DVD-RW burner.
They look the part, even if they have no function, and in each case where I've kept the busted one just for charm, I've fitted a working drive, even if I almost never use burning on OLDER PC's. I'm usually always burning them on my daily, and the older ones only need to to read.

I've had a CD-RW/DVD ROM hybrid drive here as new old stock for years and years, one day I will use it in a build. It was simply new new stock when I got it, but now it's gotten old. I got it and then like 2 days later a proper DVD-RW came on sale (for $49) so I got that as well and never fitted my $39 Hybrid Drive. why would I ever want to burn just CD's when I could be burning DVD'S!!!

[Calavera]

One more thing I forgot to ask. Has anybody ever owned a Blu-Ray burner? I never have. The discs were stupid expensive and by the time they came around flash storage was already getting cheap so there was really no point in having one.

I just checked the prices on BD-Rs and they are still too expensive to really be useful. On Amazon the Amazon's Choice and highest rated BD-Rs are a 50 pack of Verbatim 25GB discs for $47.95. That is way to high but there are also some cheaper ones with good ratings. The cheaper ones are $20.95 for a Plexdisc brand 50 pack of 25GB discs. BD-RWs however are much more expensive going for about $1.15 a piece. So that would be around $57.50 for 50 discs.

50 25GB discs will get you around 1.25TB of storage. But nowadays you can get a cheap 3TB HDD for $40. So what is the point of ever having a Blu Ray burner? For most people a 256GB flash drive will be more than enough storage and can be had for around $30 and is more more portable and easier to transfer files to other computers. With BD-R you'd basically only be able to use it on your own computer since basically no computers have a BD drive!

I'm sure there is someone out there that has some kind of use for them but for the other 99 percent of the population they are next to useless imo.

[melancholy]

I have an external Blu-Ray burner that I bought just because it was only $10 more than a regular Blu-Ray drive. But I’ve never burned a single disc with it, DVD or Blu-Ray. I mainly wanted it because I thought that the PC would have better playback software than a standalone Blu-Ray player for upscaling standard Blu-Rays to 4K. I even spent a bunch of money on some Cyberlink playback software. I used it all of one time. Setting everything up was such a hassle compared to just popping a disk into a player.

I should go back and try it again now that Windows 11 converts regular video to HDR and I have much better hardware for encoding. It may look vastly better now. But I probably never will.

[ian]

I have an external Blu-Ray burner that I bought just because it was only $10 more than a regular Blu-Ray drive. But I’ve never burned a single disc with it, DVD or Blu-Ray. I mainly wanted it because I thought that the PC would have better playback software than a standalone Blu-Ray player for upscaling standard Blu-Rays to 4K. I even spent a bunch of money on some Cyberlink playback software. I used it all of one time. Setting everything up was such a hassle compared to just popping a disk into a player.

I should go back and try it again now that Windows 11 converts regular video to HDR and I have much better hardware for encoding. It may look vastly better now. But I probably never will.

I can top that. I've had a Blu ray burner in all my computers since 2008 and have burnt 1 Blu ray with them.

And yes playing blurays on PC was/is an endless fucking nightmare of settings, and updates and problems and then more fucking updates which fucked the settings and then you need to do an update for a specific disc, and then fuck with some settings some more, and then just to cap all that fuck around off... You can have another update.

I got so fucking sick of trying that by the time 4K movies came along, it was actually quicker to rip the whole fucking movie at full quality and then play in VLC than it was to update and setup for this next disc if I wanted to watch on PC.

That's not an exaggeration like I tend to use to illustrate my points, it literally took less time to put 4K movie in and rip the whole lot, than get cyberlink to play any Blu ray properly.

My Blu ray drives have ripped hundreds of Blu rays at this point, probably written about 40 odd DVDs in that time, and about 150 CD's.

But if I get any sort of Bluray to watch, it just goes into the Xbox (first the slim, now the X)
Because even though the Xbox needs updates every 40 seconds to play games, it doesn't need them to be a competent media player.

Also THE PS4 is fucking retarded when it comes to discs... It can play Bluray and DVD, but not 4K or CD's? WHY FUCKING NOT? CD LITERALLY USES THE SAME FUCKING LASER AS DVD and BLU-RAY SAME AS 4K. and it's not a licence thing because Sony fucking co-invented the fucking things.

Bluray is a great way to consume media, it's not a great way to do literally anything else where as the optical media before it was, and still is to a certain degree.

[Calavera]

The PS4 doesn't play audio CDs? That is really odd. I mean why the hell wouldn't it? I think pretty much every console with an optical drive can play audio CDs. The only other one I know of that doesn't is the Wii. Turbografx 16 CD,Sega CD and Jaguar CD can play audio CDs. Even the Apple Pippin and FM Towns Marty can play audio CDs! That is really bizarre that the PS4 can't.

Also I had no idea playing Blu-rays on the PC was such a pain in the ass. I remember playing my first DVD video in Windows 98 using some Cyberlink software that came with the drive and there was no problem at all. After I installed the software the movie loaded right up and I was very impressed with the quality. It was that easy in 1999. Blu-Ray 4 steps forward in video quality 6 steps back in ease of use.

[pixel]

Just realized I've never owned a Blu-ray player nor ever bought any discs. I went from DVDs and the Xbox 360 to a PC and some very legal BitTorrent files.

I did have a few friends get snagged by a mail-in offer for the HDDVD Xbox 360 addon. One of them spent something like $100 for a portion of the Sopranos season 6, not even the complete season.