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

On Jul 24, 2018, at 10:55 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I personally have had reasonable success with CD-Rs. I used Verbatim Blue CD-Rs for general storage back when I had a single 6.4 GB drive in '98. I have recently read the contents of all the surviving disks with no problems that weren't resolved by a damp washcloth gently wiping the underside of the disk. I do seem to recall I had one disk that failed within a few months from what seemed to be fungus or rot. I never knew. I got rid of it quickly. All the other disks that I burned at 1x have lasted the better part of 20 years. Honestly, I have more concern about functional CD-ROM drives more so than I do the media. More and more machines I'm around don't actually have a drive capable of reading CD-ROMs. I was also exposed to some people using the El-Cheapo light (faint) green CD-Rs and they would end up having problems reliably reading from them a week or two later. I think they usually burned them as fast as their drive would allow. To me, old AOL floppy disks were more reliable than the light green CD-Rs burned at high speed. I would only tolerate light green burned at 1x if I needed to move bulk data between machines and networking was not an option. Once the data was there, I considered the CD-R to be dead and frequently physically destroyed it. -- Grant. . . . unix || die