I accidentally left a CD with a bunch of photos on it from 2005 in a shed outside until 2022 and when I mounted it, it ran great. I got back a bunch of photos from 2005 that I thought were lost. That shed gets hot as fuck during summer and then our Maine winters as famously harsh.

I was surprised the weather didn't kill the CD so as an experiment I burned a bunch of memes onto a CD and buried it in a plastic food container. I let it stay there a year and allowed the deep frost of winter to get to it. I dug it up a year later and it was fine.

So this is just a sample size of 2 but to me it seems normal everyday CDs are actually pretty tough and stable, even through brutal temperature changes and wet or frozen weather.

They rot?

You technically don't own games. You own a license to play them. This has always been the case going back at least to the 80s if not before (first time I noticed this was Dr. Mario on the NES when reading the manual as I'd just learned how to read). If your disc is ruined you can contact them for a replacement disc since your license was not destroyed or forfeited. This is also why you are legally permitted to make one backup copy. Saves them from having to do the replacement themselves.

Fun fact about cd, over half of the data present on a common cd is used for error correction and because of that it's still readable normally even in case of it having several sections significantly damaged.

When your frigging C64 5 1/4" disks keep their data for longer than relative modern DVDs...

I stored a cd R in a closet since 2004. It was sandwiched in a book for 2 years. I got curious and read it. All the files were there perfect. I copied the information and burned it to a Mdisc blue ray. In the mean time, I lost several gigs over the years from hard drive failures. One was internal of a laptop. Very unexpected. Another was an external harddrive.

I have 35 year old cd's that still work fine that sat in a unclime controlled 4 season garage

both burnt and retail

I'm at a loss, I have tons of old CDs, none have "rotted" and I definitely didn't do anything in terms of preservation.

For the last 5-8 years I only use game disks to make images out of them.

That said I have games that are 20 years old and I just keep them in normal boxes as well as jewel cases / paper sleeves and I never had a problem with a single disk going bad in any way.

I do plan to purchase a couple anti moisture gel packets and throw them into my wardrobe and boxes where I store stuff for the ease of mind :p

That looks like mold 😮reminds me og back in the days when a friend lent a cd to another friend. When he got it back it looked like it was used to eat dinner on.

Cant remember of the cd still worked.

Disc rot is so overblown I'm genuinely convinced companies are influencing discussion around it to scare people away from optical media.

In the, probably near 1000, discs I own

I have one with rot, and that's a CD manufactured in a specific plant, within a specific timeframe known (for decades now) to have had issues.

So it's not as if it's a random occurrence which has caused that disc to fail, but posts like this always seem to push the idea that "your disc could just die at any time bro" and it's simply not true.

Just wait until we can access our DNA

This pops into my head everytime Mutahar goes on one of his “preservation rants.” My guy I do not care if the game gets deleted, it will be backed up digitally if it’s worth backing up.

What's the consensus as far as BD-R discs go? Does the coating help them last longer?

Codex are doing the real game preservation nowadays

Really makes me wonder what on earth kind of place this was stored in

Back in the day Blizzard replaced my Warcraft II disc. Too bad they're shit now.

For those with large collections of optical media, the Council on Library and Information Resources published a guide titled Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, which provides some good info on safeguarding said collections.

wii u disc moment

Where the hell was this disk kept? Last time I saw one like this it was an AOL Starter Disc I found during spring cleanup a couple years ago. God knows how many freeze and thaw cycles that thing had gone through but it was version 5.0 so we're talking at least 20 years outside.

That thing was used as a drink coaster

out of the literal hundreds of discs i've seen from my own home(s), friends, family, and thrift stores, i have not oncw, not ever seen real disc rot with my own eyes. i wouldn't know about it if the internet wasn't a thing. it's so weird to use disc rot as a argument against optical. might as well use getting struck by lightning as a excuse to never go outside. what conditions need to be met for this kind of rot to occur?

True back up is with LTO.