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.

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.

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

All my disks are imaged and the images are all I ever interact with. I only keep the physical disks as extra backups now. Gave up on the idea of “collecting” after facing the reality that packaging starts to disintegrate after a couple of decades, not to mention disk rot.

Wrap a box in aluminum foil -bam= Faraday cage on the cheap

Yeah no shit, nothing lasts forever. Doesn’t stop me from preserving everything as best as I can tho.

I recently tried to read a small number of 30+ year-old floppy disks containing code I wrote for the Atari ST and they’re all unreadable. The disk surface is noticably degraded.

A mix of buying cheap disks, using non-standard formats to prioritise space over reliability, and waiting too long to duplicate the data.

Lesson learned.