CD deterioration

bookduck

7 years ago I had some CDs and thier shelf life was measured in weeks, some were so bad the They would not work after 2 days. No it was not scraches or physical damage, but composition of the coating.

esbo

Marty_J wrote: »

Well maybe he did, but he can't sell it on eBay if it's only a backup.

Yes I thought that might be the case, I just thought he might want to listen to it
himself, but I guess as he has not listened to it for a good while, so no great loss,
apart from the tenner

Anyhow I find CD's too unreliable for back-up, hence I use a hard drive, mind you
I will lose a fair bit when that fails :rotfl:

However it is a 500 gig drive so I can back up both my hard drives to it,
with 160 gig to spare, so it would require simultaneous failures to lose anything.

Thats a hell of a lot of data, my first PC only had a 2 gig drive (still got it!! doesn't
work anymore though), but the 4 gig one I bought for it a bit later does.

If the cycle repeats my next computer will have a 3.2 terabye hard drive and a
baclup drive of 20 terabytes, could take a while to format

Quaint1

A couple of years ago there were reports of 'CD Rot' which affected some CD releases from the late 80's/early 90's; basically, the problem was that the ink used to print the label side of the CD was gradually eating into the aluminium recording surface - examples included "The Joshua Tree" by U2. There is an article on Wikipedia and this news item on the BBC website goes into a little more detail.
There really isn't an awful lot you can do about it if there are a lot of pinholes in the aluminium layer unfortunately.
Au Res.,
Paul

Marty_J

esbo wrote: »

Yes I thought that might be the case, I just thought he might want to listen to it
himself, but I guess as he has not listened to it for a good while, so no great loss,
apart from the tenner

Anyhow I find CD's too unreliable for back-up, hence I use a hard drive, mind you
I will lose a fair bit when that fails :rotfl:

However it is a 500 gig drive so I can back up both my hard drives to it,
with 160 gig to spare, so it would require simultaneous failures to lose anything.

Thats a hell of a lot of data, my first PC only had a 2 gig drive (still got it!! doesn't
work anymore though), but the 4 gig one I bought for it a bit later does.

If the cycle repeats my next computer will have a 3.2 terabye hard drive and a
baclup drive of 20 terabytes, could take a while to format

I used to have a computer with a 30 MB HDD, double-spaced no less!

weegie.geek

My first hard drive was in my Amiga 600, and it was all of 20MB. Enough space for the OS and Monkey Island 2, and not a lot more.

Back on topic, CD rot is quite common in early CDs. There was one batch that was particularly bad. Can't remember which music label it affected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_rot

It's not specific to CDs either, it happens to DVDs as well and there'll no doubt be bad batches of bluray discs.