On 7/21/18 9:14 AM, Carlo Pisani via cctalk wrote:
what is your experience?
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
