how good is the data reliability with CD ROM and DVD RAM?

[Jules Richardson]

On 07/21/2018 10:14 AM, Carlo Pisani via cctalk wrote:
> hi
> yesterday I was shocked by a couple of videos on Youtube where guys
> pointed out their negative experiences with CD ROM and DVD RAM as
> media for their own backup.
> 
> They complained their data completely lost after 5 years of storage in
> CD ROMs, pointing out that their CDs were perfectly conserved and kept
> clean without scratches, but all the data is gone lost since the media
> is unreadable.

I've found in the past that problems with CDs are two-fold:

1) Deterioration of the media itself (which was particularly bad in the 
early days)

2) Incompatibilities with media and/or the burning process across drives 
and platforms.

The latter cropped up time and again, enough that I decided it was too 
risky to keep data on CD because I might want to come back to it 5 or 10 
(or more) years later and find that no hardware that I had available was 
capable of reading it.

I don't know if DVD is any better; I developed a deep mistrust of any 
optical media and so I avoid it except for transient stuff where there's no 
alternative.

cheers

Jules