Why DVDs are not safe
Recently I was going through my movie collection and I came across a copy of Terminator, Special Edition, which I have never even played. I thought I would get it out and play it, only to discover that something strange had happened to the disks.
They are totally unusable and I would not put them into any dvd drive
Here are a few pictures, as you can see there is an odd coating to the disks. It seems that the plastic of the disk has degraded and gone sticky. It feels similar to an old elastic band that has been in the sun too long.
This got me thinking and so I started going through some of the disks I burned going back over the last 10 years. I didn’t find any others affected in a similar way but many of the disks would not play or the files would not open. Of the disks older than 3 years about 80% were damaged or unreadable. This just reinforces my belief that CDs and DVDs are not a medium for backups of data.
Online backup and storage offers the best solution as you are not reliant a single disk and because the data is stored on servers that are powered up the data will never degrade.
5 Responses to “Why DVDs are not safe”
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