Disc rot

Do you still have CD's or DVD's laying around containing backups? Images, documents, music, or other stuff that you like to (re)use some day?

How reliable are those discs?


Old discs

A new year, so time to clean up. A bit.

I found two more boxes with old CD's / DVD's in the attic. They're not containing anything really valuable, but I wondered how well they would still read after fifteen years or so. I already maintained a table, and am in the process of adding these.

I am actually surprised they read fairly well, with so far perhaps a 4% failure rate. That sounds bad as a long term backup, but most of the failures were (scratched) DVD's and cheap CD-roms.

You'll find the results here.

I still have a bunch of disks left and will add those results when I get back to it.