They don’t last very long. About 5-10 years at most, and that’s if you bought special archival burnable DVDs. If you depend on them for backups, you should check the integrity annually (always include a checksum like SHA256 with any backup archive).
I have CDs that I burned in the 90s that still work fine. I’m assuming the blu-rays I burn now will probably last as long, which is decades longer than I need them to.
Music CDs or data? Music CDs have built-in error correction, data CDs don’t. You can certainly extend the lifetime if they’re stored in the dark in a cool, dry place (UV light, heat, and humidity all damage the dye that gets burned to encode them) but they’re not reliable archival storage without error correction.
Music. I have some data CDs I burned in the mid 2000s, that I booted up a few years ago (Linux live CDs). I don’t have any data CDs from the 90s though. IIRC, ISO 9660 does have error correction.
Edit: I just looked it up. ISO 9660 doesn’t have error correction, but the underlying system, CD-ROM Mode 1, does have error correction.
They don’t last very long. About 5-10 years at most, and that’s if you bought special archival burnable DVDs. If you depend on them for backups, you should check the integrity annually (always include a checksum like SHA256 with any backup archive).
I have CDs that I burned in the 90s that still work fine. I’m assuming the blu-rays I burn now will probably last as long, which is decades longer than I need them to.
I heard that the higher the data density on DVD and BR means the higher the failure rate. Though i have no real evidence of that myself.
Maybe one or two bits corrupted here or there will only cause some unnoticeable artefacts anyway.
Music CDs or data? Music CDs have built-in error correction, data CDs don’t. You can certainly extend the lifetime if they’re stored in the dark in a cool, dry place (UV light, heat, and humidity all damage the dye that gets burned to encode them) but they’re not reliable archival storage without error correction.
Data CDs actually use even more robust error correction since they use interleaving in addition to FEC since they don’t need to scan in “real time”
Music. I have some data CDs I burned in the mid 2000s, that I booted up a few years ago (Linux live CDs). I don’t have any data CDs from the 90s though. IIRC, ISO 9660 does have error correction.
Edit: I just looked it up. ISO 9660 doesn’t have error correction, but the underlying system, CD-ROM Mode 1, does have error correction.