Does disc rot TERRIFY anyone else?!

[Ghaleon64]

So all this talk lately about disc rot and how it could possibly affect every disc EVER has me a tad worried...

Especially since I randomly grabbed a few OST's to check. Difficult to replace OST's like Akumajo Dracula X and Suite Gradius Fantasia. Guess what I found?

And I absolutely BABY my discs. Course, most of these were bought secondhand so who knows how the previous owner kept them. But I'm seeing little pinholes in a few of my discs.

So what could this mean for the future of collecting? Or reselling? Some day, a disc you bought years before for a small fortune could be worth nothing if it doesn't play anymore, right? Does this terrify anyone else? I'm OCD about the condition of my discs. So to know that there is something going around that you have absolutely no control over that could damage your discs beyond repair is just very upsetting to me.

I'm considering getting one of those devices you see on TV for cooking that vacuum seals your food in a plastic bag. I mean, it's oxygenation that is killing these foils data presses, right? So, if we were to eliminate the oxygen, wouldn't that stop disc rot in it's tracks?

Thoughts?

[Phonograph]

honestly, I never heard cds could rot, I have cds for like 15 years (and some from 20) and it's still in good shape
but I must say that due to some scratches made to some cds by an old (and long disappeared) cd player, I don't use cd player or anything that can play cds (except in the process of ripping to prevent any possible scratch)

[Kimimi]

Doesn't bother me at all - I've got 5 inch floppies that are still doing just fine so I'm sure CDs will be at least as resilient in the long run.

That's not to say that CD rot doesn't exist; just that these things are never as bad as they're made out to be (i.e: the TOTAL DESTRUCTION of all optical media more than a decade old) and even if they do it's not unreasonable to expect mass produced media to eventually fail anyway - these things were made as a bit of spin-off merchandise for (Japanese) fans, they were never intended to be archive material.

[ilef]

Nope, especially since everything "rots" with time?! Hard Disks, consoles' lens, PC,... Sure, this stuff is pretty resilient... And I suppose that within each "new" support/production their lifespan will get even better, but still... They won't work forever. I'm sorry to come off like quoting "The Matrix", but everything which has a beginning... has an end. One thing you could try to somewhat avoid it is "copy->move from storage A to storage B from time to time", for example. Accept the possibility that the original may stop to function, regardless of the care you put into it.

[miky90]

Well yes, discs does't last for ever, original copies dont use great quality discs as u may think. But u can digitalize them.
Also there are on the market discs created to last a lot like 50years, u can backup your favorites on them.

[ᄐv๑–X²]

Collecting CD's is a fun (and pricey) hobby. Its fun archiving, most would agree. But seriously how far do you want CD's to last? We grow old and change tastes. We live generally 60-100 years. Life changes constantly and oneself has no total control over things.

Least thing to worry about is CD durability, at least for me (doesn't mean I don't take care of my collection). Best to listen them in physical media while one still has it.

[Foxhack]

I've got a bunch of twenty to twenty five year old CDs (non VGM) that already have rotting. A bunch of stuff I've looked at recently has this problem too. Most of the time this happens on CDs that don't have any actual artwork, and are just the normal silver color with black writing on 'em.

I always rip everything to FLAC with ExactAudioCopy, 'cause you never know when these discs will be fully unusable...

[thedreamtraveler]

I have a quick question about "Disc Rot", once a CD starts to "rot" and the holes start to form all around the disc, is it completely useless? Meaning that you can't just put it into a player, computer or other device with a disc laser, and burn a new copy? The old one would be completely ruined, loosing all collector's value, but the new one would be a non-original listenable copy like new? The only reason I ask is because my Dad had an old CD, non-VGM, that for some reason wouldn't play in any player. I never checked the disc but it more than likely had some disc rot happening to it, so we burned him a new blank one and now it plays fine. I don't know much about disc rot, which is why I am asking. Reminds me of the time I learned that all my cartridge based games, particularly my Gameboy/Color/Advance games, had a battery that eventually dies making my save go out the window eventually weather I play them or not. :-/

[LiquidAcid]

Originally Posted by thedreamtraveler

I have a quick question about "Disc Rot", once a CD starts to "rot" and the holes start to form all around the disc, is it completely useless? Meaning that you can't just put it into a player, computer or other device with a disc laser, and burn a new copy?

Once you can visually spot disc rot, it's often already too late and the disc sectors lying in the oxidated area are already lost. I've experienced several occurrences of disc rot on CD-R media over the past years. Some of which weren't visually detectable, but the sectors were unreadable nonetheless.

[_if]

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

I've experienced several occurrences of disc rot on CD-R media over the past years. Some of which weren't visually detectable, but the sectors were unreadable nonetheless.

Most likely that's not disc rot, it's the dye fading. That happens much faster than rot.

[LiquidAcid]

Originally Posted by _if

Most likely that's not disc rot, it's the dye fading. That happens much faster than rot.

It was almost always affecting the outer sectors first, so I presume it was induced by oxygen which entered from the disc edge (due to poor adhesive compound). Which would make it disc rot.

[thedreamtraveler]

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

Once you can visually spot disc rot, it's often already too late and the disc sectors lying in the oxidated area are already lost. I've experienced several occurrences of disc rot on CD-R media over the past years. Some of which weren't visually detectable, but the sectors were unreadable nonetheless.

Well that's comforting! Thank you though for helping me out, the more I know about this kind of thing the more prepared for it I can be in the future. I don't want my music collection, especially my vgm collection which has taken both a considerable amount of time and money to have, to be lost forever. Even if any of my CD's get "disc rot", I would like to know that while my originals are destroyed that I can still access them digitally on my laptop, hard drive, flash drive, or my personal favorite a solid state drive. Those things are wicked!

I guess I should look into burning my collection as a back up sometime in the near future so that I don't loose my tunes!

[LiquidAcid]

Originally Posted by thedreamtraveler

I guess I should look into burning my collection as a back up sometime in the near future so that I don't loose my tunes!

Recordable optical media is probably the worst way to store backups.

[thedreamtraveler]

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

Recordable optical media is probably the worst way to store backups.

It's funny that you say that because I was just going to ask you guys what you recommend being the best way to store and archive this stuff so that I will always have a back up of it. I am thinking that storing my collection on a huge solid state hard drive, even though those things are crazy expensive for even small amounts of storage. I would store my back ups as all lossless of course!

[LiquidAcid]

Originally Posted by thedreamtraveler

I am thinking that storing my collection on a huge solid state hard drive, even though those things are crazy expensive for even small amounts of storage.

Why a solid state drive? Almost nothing is known about long-term aging resistance for this tech. You better go with something like tape or a RAID array of server-grade drives (plus the usual monitoring).

[thedreamtraveler]

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

Why a solid state drive? Almost nothing is known about long-term aging resistance for this tech. You better go with something like tape or a RAID array of server-grade drives (plus the usual monitoring).

I figured solid state drives because of many reasons, one of which is that I heard they are good drives and the other is that they aren't like the usual hard drives in computers which use moving parts. I thought they would be a good choice as I wouldn't have to worry about them crapping out on me or basically "failing" on me. Things will break regardless of what they are, hard drives included, but I heard that they were more stable than a usual drive. I have had a number of drives, like for my PS3, which have went bad or didn't work. I am new to this type of thing, not really a tech person so much which is why I usually leave that kind of thing to my older brother.

Thank you for the input/advice! I appreciate it and will definitely look into what you said! I want to have my collection for a very long time!

[PerfectZer0]

The oldest CD I have is Gradius III. It still plays just fine. Nope, not worried. =D

[krelian75]

I don't intend to terrify you more Ghaleon, but here's a page you might wanna check.

Every physical media is unfortunately bound to "rot", so you might want to consider backing up your collection digitally.
Sure it's a bummer for us collectors to visualize our hard-earned collections will vanish someday, but nothing we can do buddy.
The fastest you realize it the better.

[Jodo Kast]

I used to worry about disc rot, but I believe everything produced by humans that has been archived will continue to be archived, provided there is not a catastrophe that destroys the archives. So many people are copying data, uploading data, etc., that if you somehow lose a disc to rot, you will at least be able to download it from somewhere.

I also think that storage media capable of storing every CD, movie, TV show, and book ever produced by humans will be very affordable within our lifetimes. In other words, it will one day be trivial for someone to have everything everyone has ever done.

[GoldfishX]

I would worry more about lossless audio rot. Would destroy the peace of mind of having an original preserved forever in soft copy format.

Most of the time, once I rip a CD to FLAC, I'm done with it and it's a shelf decoration. So if my discs started rotting, I probably wouldn't notice. Only way I'd notice is if I sold it and someone complained. That would suck.

[Lackadaisical]

My immediate concern with disc rot is if it's an eventuality that I will have to deal with sooner rather than much later.

If it's sooner, like within a couple of years from now for my older soundtracks, then there wouldn't be much of an incentive in collecting out of print soundtracks that are brand new, like new, or even in great condition. What would be the point in hunting down and collecting soundtracks in the best condition possible if the CD is going to rot sooner than expected? Well, unless the price difference between the various conditions is negligible.

I would also say that the integrity of the contents on a CD is a more important issue. It's much easier to notice that a CD will no longer play than it is to notice that the integrity of the contents on a CD have been compromised or at least it would be in my case.

My back up solution is pretty standard: Rip the CD in WAV format onto my desktop computer, and then after using a file archiving program (no compression) and obtaining a hash value, back it up once more on multiple external hard drives.

[quintin3265]

The only way to prevent disk rot is to actively scan disks to detect it, and correct the errors when they occur.

In hard drives, these are called "unrecoverable read errors," and in consumer drives they occur once in about 10tb of writes. You can easily get around this problem by using a RAID 6 array. There are software RAID cards that cost less than $100, and you can buy very small Western Digital Red drives if you can't afford or don't need a lot of storage. You just buy two extra disks, which hold checksums of the data on the other disks.

If a bit flips in a RAID 6 array, since there are three "copies" of the data, a voting algorithm easily determines which data is correct and the bad sector is rewritten somewhere else. This is called a "Patrol Read," which the computer is programmed to do automatically. Once a week, all bytes on all disks are read, and any detected errors are repaired.

Since this is an active process, it is possible to protect data indefinitely provided the computer is turned on periodically to perform a patrol read. You do have to rip disks and put them on the array first, but for me the trouble is more than worth the effort.

I'm going on 18 years of never having lost a single byte of data using this process combined with putting the original CDs offsite as a backup.

[Ghaleon64]

You got it Lackadaisical. That is my #1 fear, that the joy and thrill of collecting will soon be dead since CD's rot whether they're new or not.

But yeah, backing up in WAV or FLAC is the next logical step.