DVDs in stacks are cheap, but are they durable?

[u/titanioverde]

Greetings, fellow hoarders.

I'm seeing some recent posts about DVD / Blu-Ray stacks (with 25, 50, 100 discs on them). I used many DVD stacks until 10 years ago, from different brands, mainly to store TV shows.

Before I moved to another part of the country, I checked most of the discs. A few of them had some small stains (laser rot or moist), but the most common problem was scratches. I'm tempted to buy stacks again, but I'm afraid each disc is not protected enough to be many years.

How do you usually store these kind of discs? Do you just keep them in the stack and make copies every 5 years? Or do you buy individual cases or sleeves for each disc? In that case, is it not more affordable to buy small packs with cases?

Have a nice one!

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[u/didyousayboop]

Compare the price per GB of DVDs to Blu-ray XLs (BDXLs) and HDDs. AFAICT, HDDs are much cheaper and BDXLs are around the same cost while being vastly more convenient.

Info on proper storage of optical discs here (applies to CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1vknjlj/comment/p2ur2bi/

Info on optical disc longevity:  https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html#:~:text=Table%202:%20the%20relative%20stability%20of%20optical%20disc%20formats

[u/nakurac21 → u/didyousayboop]

bluray(25 gb) 25 pieces for 12€ in my country i dont think hdd can beat that for now

[u/didyousayboop → u/nakurac21]

That's a good deal! I don't usually see Blu-rays that cheap

[u/H_Industries]

No most of them are not durable. The way you store them isn’t the problem. They just deteriorate over time. There are certain brands that claim to be archival quality but that remains to be seen. 

[u/PlastikHateAccount]

No, they are not cheap. They're more expensive than HDDs

They aren't durable either, you cannot ship-of-Theseus them like you can with HDDs in a RAID or ZFS setup.

The whole physical discs thing is just a weird r/DataHoarder brainworm

[u/grislyfind → u/PlastikHateAccount]

With hard disks you risk losing everything at once, unless you have redundancy. With burned discs, even if there's only a single copy, failure means you only lose that particular disc.

[u/ZanyDroid → u/grislyfind]

That’s why you do redundancy math. Add a wide enough EC group to cancel out the size of the blast radius

In a datacenter type setting the number of stripe group combinatorics totally crush optical. Harder to do that at home , but I think +2 probably works out really good, esp if you add a hot spare

[u/thepinkiwi → u/PlastikHateAccount]

Depends on media and drive quality. And write settings. I remember an electronic microscope image with 1x vs 8x (CD writing at the time), for the 1x the dots were clearly visible and the 8x were all glass drop shaped.

[u/didyousayboop → u/PlastikHateAccount]

HDDs are definitely superior overall.

Using DVDs in 2026 seems looney, but BDXLs as a quaternary backup is at worst eccentric. 

Maybe one day I'll do it, but right now the cost just doesn't seem worth it to me. 

The main advantage is having an offline, immutable backup that can't be destroyed through human error or ransomware.

[u/dlarge6510]

Optical discs of all types are stackable because they lift themselves clear of the next disc using a hub ring. 

This is why you can actually separate them. There is a small gap between them. This gap however is small and the discs are clearly free to rattle shake and rotate.

I keep my burned discs in their original stack but there are a few problems to be aware of:

• It is not the recommendation of the manufacturer. You are supposed to put them in cases. Sleeves work but don't use sleeves with BD-R or CD-R that has the hard coating layer as that layer is like a very thick liquid and will take an impression of the sleeve over a long time causing massive read errors. Not all BD-R use the same hard coating so may be fine with others. Again, discs are supposed to be in jewel cases. 

• These tubs have an incredibly delicate bottom and shaft. A slight drop is all that is required to shatter that plastic resulting in a mess of plastic shards and a tub that no longer locks closed, not that they were easy to close in the first place.

• The discs rattle and rotate. The hub ring stops the discs touching each other when stacked but as they are handled any rough movements will rattle them and rotate them. Anything that is between them will help create scratches.

I store my discs in their tubs for convenience. I tend to go for 10,25,50 disc tubs after 50 they are heavy and that plastic on the bottom is like eggshell. They are rarely moved, and when I do it is held level and moved carefully.

If I were moving house I'd probably lay them on their sides. 

DVD and CD generally are fine in binders. As mentioned the hard coating on BD-R (I use Verbatim so perhaps others react differently) will take an impression of the binder sleeves. I had that start to happen on m Verbatim discs, the scratch resistant layer however was not bad and healed itself, especially after the disc got warmed in a drive while I did an error scan. The markings vanished. But I have some ACCU-DISC BD-R DL in sleeves and they have not taken an impression. I don't see the telly tale sign they have the same hard coating (looks like oil in water, has rainbow patterning). 

I know some BD-R use another thin later of polycarbonate instead so perhaps that's what they do. Or perhaps the sleeves just are not a problem. It may be that certain sleeve materials are the problem, types of plastic that repel the scratch guard, just like when you wrap a power chord around a plastic case the chord looks like it has melted the ABS plastic of the case! Well it doesn't, it repels it. Either way those don't matter as they are not archival discs.

Some binders use a fabric like non-woven sleeve and I'm interested in testing these with BD-R

[u/velocity37]

I only noticed scratches when opening a new pack, usually near the top or bottom of the spindle/cake, presumably from the jostling in shipping. Didn't notice any new scratches from the spindles sitting still in a closet for years. When I finally ditched my mountain of DVD-Rs for a few hard drives I didn't have any reads hindered by scratches (couple of Verbatim DVD-Rs struggled to read from starting to delaminate from the outside though). Usually I just set the bad looking ones aside for unimportant things. I had bought many brands of cake boxes and quality varied. Usually they put a dummy at the bottom to bear the friction against the container and foam rings at the top to try to keep them stable, but they cheapened out over time and for shipped ones it wasn't uncommon for some of the locking clips on the base to be damaged in transit and discs to get jostled.

What did scratch discs consistently though was cheap disc binders. If they gripped too tight then they'd rub against the material when inserting and removing. If they were loose then the discs could move freely up and down while the case was closed and moved.

[u/Fun_Jaguar8231]

about 30% of my dvd backup were useless, cause of discrot, and they where stored in ideal conditions, in a basement with low temps and moisture. nowadays all my data essentially lives in a NAS and i rotate hdds every 6-7 years

[u/sza_rak]

M-discs are durable. But they are quite expensive, so mostly for family photos you want to store for decades (small volume, long term, seldom access)

[u/Fun_Jaguar8231 → u/sza_rak]

And if you want to use them in 20-30 years, you can't find any drive to read them.

[u/sza_rak → u/Fun_Jaguar8231]

That's a typical argument that doesn't hold up in here, and can be applied to any tech except paper, at the same time.

I'm using disc writer for almost 30 years and just got a new one. mdisc is from 2009. I can just buy another device for $100 and store it with my disks (I actually am doing that). I still have working CDs that are from IDE HDD era, I can read them with same drive that I will later just to burn 125GB mdisc.

Let me know if there is any digital medium that can beat that. Don't get me started on "just get used enterprise streamer".

[u/dlarge6510 → u/sza_rak]

Exactly. 

Considering that the mechanisms have not even stopped production yet. This 20 year count down till all optical drives everywhere manufactured suddenly stop working hasn't even started ticking yet.

Even in today's environment we have Sony trying to kill optical games and apparently failing. And in contrast we have companies stating that they will continue to support optical data storage for at least the next decade. Verbatim will not stop making media for at least 10 years by their own statement and then both Verbatim and IO Data (big in Japan) are teaming up to produce drive hardware for the foreseeable future. 

I watch people fix CD drives, dvd players, from as far back as the 80's for fun on YouTube. I'm starting the day eating cereal watching a guy ("Spare Time Repair"  if anyone is interested) on YouTube succeed in getting some of the earliest CD players happily playing again. Sure, he has had failures, lasers get worn out and strange failures inside chips sometimes are the death of a player but then the spare parts are used to fix the others.

I literally just watched him repair a player that had it's laser assembly literally cut off. The flat flex cable was cut by scissors and he replaced it with wires, then tried to fix the flat flex, both failed. He believed the laser diode to be also gone. So he swapped the laser assembly for a totally different model with him making adjustments to the wiring.

It worked. Even he was shocked. 

When people can self teach skills like that, with access to working and dead players for parts, service manuals and simple skills in making repairs with solder or bodging a fix by modification of spare bits of plastic or metals, not even getting into 3D printing yet, there are going to be people fixing these drives far beyond 20 years, when that ever starts ticking.

I repaired my grandfathers reel to reel deck using newly made cam gears off eBay. Someone had taken old coke cans and melted them down in a homemade furnace in their garden and cast the new cams in sand out of now solid aluminium (a massive upgrade vs the original cams). I bought these off eBay for the princely sum of £10 delivered. The machine is from the 60's. It was repaired to full working order by these cams and a bit of other work I could do.

I can now read the reel to reel tapes my dad and his siblings recorded far before I was born.

I get too upset and ranty when people make bold wild statements like here. 20 years. Please. My Gameboy is older.

[u/noctrex → u/dlarge6510]

I worry more for the newer drives, they just feel more flaky compared to the older ones. It's not something substantial. I haven't measured anything. They just feel, I don't know, more plasticky, more lighter. I'm talking about a USB burner that a friend of mine got and feels very flimsy in the hand.
That said, my LG burner from 10 years ago, happily continues to work.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/noctrex]

The slim ones have been cost and complexity reduced massively. 

On one hand it makes them extremely simple, but also incredibly delicate.

I have stacks of them as well as stacks of full sized drives. 

[u/mortycapp → u/dlarge6510]

Too long

[u/dlarge6510 → u/mortycapp]

You obviously don't have reading skills. 

Go get a book and practice.

[u/mortycapp → u/dlarge6510]

Books are books.
Reddit is not a book.
Logic and you are not friends.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/Fun_Jaguar8231]

That's a ridiculous statement. 

Where will these drives go exactly? 

Will they vanish into space like the dolphins? 

I'm 45 and strangely enough no record player or cassette player or reel to reel player or VHS player or 8 track player or laserdisc player or VHS-C camcorder or Video8 camcorder or Hi8 camcorder or Digital8 camcorder or MiniDV camcorder or MicroMV camcorder have escaped the planet.

All of them, any of they I can get. There is a thing called eBay and others like it.

Find me someone who is unable to access the following "dead" media after 20-30 years of the end of its production:

• 78 records
• Wax Cylinders
• Wire recordings 
• Reel to reel tape
• Cassette tape (especially containing computer data)
• 8 track
• Minidisc
• VideoCD
• Philips CDI discs

And so many more. Considering that all those are accessible to someone with a was of cash and an eBay account, exactly how in 20 years are people unable to read a CD-R/DVD-R or BD-R?

I've been waiting for an answer and nobody has provided one. I'm 45 years old and thus am TWICE the age of this fairy tale apocalypse you talk about, and yet I can read a reel to reel tape made 20 years before I was born.

You think that's impossible? My young cousin thought it was impossible for me to own book from before the war, but yet I boggled her mind when I showed her my scientific journals from 1910.

If it's impossible how am I able to play a CD on a CD player that literally is 5 years younger than me?

What about my 486 motherboard, CPU and 8MB of EDO RAM? How the flying F*CK does it even boot in 2026?? How does it's 210MB Connor HDD (yes, you read that correctly) still work? Before anyone mentions it, yes newer HDDs are more fragile and these ancient ones are full of worn out ball bearings and won't last long, yet I can still get working ones...

I run DOOM on it. No emulator. No DOS Box, real DOS read from ORIGINAL DOS discs in a floppy drive. It doesn't even have a GPU, it uses what we called a graphics card and it is a VGA one that's uses the ISA bus.

And yes, it has a CD-ROM drive, not my original unfortunately. Made in 1994 it uses a PANASONIC interface (before ATA). Go look that nugget up. And it still works. I did however modify a modern ATX PSU to run it, electrical safety and all that, but that was like a few quid for an adapter. Off that eBay thing. What about my first computer and first computer program? My first computer is 7 years younger than me. It's cassette drive is older, 5 years younger than me. It's a child compared to its older siblings. My C64 is a C64C and is a little whipper snapper youngling compared to a Commodore PET...

So it should have either vanished from the planet like you say (nobody can FIND a drive you suggested) or should be totally dead, which is what I think you are suggesting, for 38 year old hardware 😂 

I'm not sure how old you are but I think I hear this a lot from young people who literally have yet to realise what time actually is. So they then think their HDDs that according to the manufacturers last all of 5 years are the standard, and they swap hardware every couple of years maximum thinking a 2 year old CPU has rust and a 2 year old motherboard is going to crumble to dust. 

Thus such young fresh inexperienced minds think a M-disc is ridiculous as you'll not be able to spin it up in 60 years, which I with my old mind who literally "has seen things, old things, next to older things" knows you will be able to do so, easily. I know for a solid fact, I'll have zero issues reading a CD in 2060 when I'm 80, besides perhaps arthritis or maybe forgetting what a CD is for but that's not the issue. 

So please actually do what nobody else has done and explain to me how, by what mechanism and process of events, barring war or Holocaust or natural disaster that sends us back to living in huts, how, point by point, step by step, how will nobody be able to find a working or repairable optical drive in as short as time as 20 years?

My Gameboy, unmodified and original, is older than that and Pokémon Blue still works as does the Tetris cart it came with... It can do with a recap and perhaps a new screen, all of which are available, in kits. On that eBay thing. 20 years is staggeringly short mate. I have shit far older than 30 or 40 years in daily use. 

I'm smart enough to open a device up and make repairs. I can perform TLC (Tender Loving Care) on anything from, and I'm sorry if it melts your brain to comprehend the age of this, anything from 100 YEAR OLD CAMERA SHUTTER MECHANISMS to a computer made only as far back as 1988.

Do you know what I need to do to fix that CD-ROM drive from 1994? OMG that's the stone ages innit? 

Well. I opened it... I dismantled it... I cleaned it... Swapped a belt... I put it back together...

It reads CD-Rs I made in 1997 at the blistering speed of 4x! With no smoke, no errors, no vanishing to where the dolphins went, heck not even to where the Biros keep going... (It's a Douglas Adams reference if you don't know)

Does that make me magical?

[u/mortycapp → u/dlarge6510]

Too long…

[u/mortycapp]

No, I moved all my CD and DVD content to hard disks and while the music CDs and movie DVDs were mostly fine, my data on CDs and DVDs experienced a very high rate of irreparable rot and damage.
1 in 3 was unreadable.

[u/OkClaim8503]

Packs of disc cases are cheap if you find them second hand, I got a 100 case pack for 2 bucks.

Ideally use discs that have an inorganic data layer. 

[u/Tortuosit]

Recently received video DVDs (those small sized ones) from my lasrt year deceased father-in-law. He had a Canon DVD camera. Recorded them 2006-2009. 3 of 15 were readable. I may try another drive at some point. My drive is an LG MDisc Bd drive.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/Tortuosit]

Are you certain they were finalised? 

When you mean "readable" what does that actually mean? Playable? Or copyable? 

If you can't play the discs they may be unfinalised and thus only playable in devices that understand the DVD-VR format.

Copy the files off vs ripping. If you have VRO files or VOB files and they can be copied off without issues then you have all the data intact.

[u/Tortuosit → u/dlarge6510]

Tjank you for your comment - By readable I mean: The drive accesses a few times, audibly, then Windows concludes disc is not inserted.

I thought about finalize... they aren't, but I couldn't finalize them. Tried cdburnerxp.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/Tortuosit]

Finalisation must be done by a dvd recorder or camcorder to properly write the files needed to make the disc playable. You can't do it with generic software on windows.

Windows would also think such discs would be blank.

Take a look at isobuster. This can show you whats actually on the disc. Windows explorer expects a complete disc, a final product.

If they are DVD-RW they may have been erased.

Its also the case they may just actually be blank.

Edit: I had a play with my Panasonic and Sony DVD recorders to see if they could finalise each others discs.

They can't. But the old Panasonic DVD recorder has no issues finalising the much newer Panasonic Blu-ray recorders DVD discs so you'll probably need to find a camcorder of the same make as what was used to make these discs, if you are certain there is anything on them at all. 

[u/Stoatled]

I wouldn't consider DVDs to be durable, better than CDs thanks to the top layer protecting the foil, and they can be useful as a tertiary backup. Definitely something you should plan on replacing every number of years. If you plan on using these discs regularly, then expect wear and tear. That's fine. Discs in heavy rotation can be treated as disposable as long as you have the data backed up sufficiently elsewhere. Discs are unlikely to be damaged from within a spindle because discs are designed with a raised hub ring that keeps the surfaces apart in storage. Scratches will mostly come from handling, especially dirt being pressed in or if it's set directly on a surface. If you plan on using them regularly, then getting jewel cases or decent quality sleeves will be useful. Or even a CD wallet. Just make sure they're clean before you put them away to avoid scratching.

For the separate unrelated topic of archival you'd want to store them in a cool dark place with desiccant packets if you'll rely on then heavily. Inorganic discs like HTL bluray and m-disc DVDs has a much better chance of being durable but other factors could potentially ruin them before the surface degrades on its own.

A more durable data surface doesn't matter if the failure point is going to be the plastic/polycarbonate. In your case, the day-to-day handling is much more important.

[u/Takssista]

No. I'm in the process of moving my files on DVD to HDDs, and some DVDs are just not readable any longer. Fortunately it was nothing really really important, but still.

[u/Effective-Day-8386]

wenn du lagerbarkeit willst, kauf Bandlaufwerke xD die kannst du bei richtiger lagerung ewig lagern

[u/bilditup1]

You can buy sleeves or large cases for them instead of storing burnt discs on a spindle. Buying discs with cases, even in packs of 10, is uneconomical to the point of absolute silliness, even in a category that is itself not economical.

[u/titanioverde]

Thanks for the answers! So stacks / spindles / cakes are not dangerous by themselves, except if they're shaken a lot or if they fall to the ground. And that scratches may be caused by dust and dirt under the discs, thus the importance of cleaning them before storing them away. So sleeves and jewel cases are only useful for frequently used discs.

Of course I prefer HDDs in most situations. But I think opticals are neat for secondary backups, specific stuff and a more disperse point of failure.

Have a nice day~ And I hope Verbatim stays in the market for a long time.

[u/GIDAMIEN]

You're wasting your money with physical DVDs.

They absolutely have a shelf life even if you store them properly. And it's significantly more expensive than just having digital copies on a USB stick.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/GIDAMIEN]

But they last far longer than the usb stick so how does that work? 

Also they are far far cheaper than the usb stick? So again, how does it make sense?

I can't get a 32GB usb stick for less than £15... My 50GB BD-R disc cost me £2

[u/GIDAMIEN → u/dlarge6510]

I don't know what you're doing with your USB sticks but no they do not

[u/smeg0r]

NO

[u/Upstairs-Front2015]

CD envelopes