> I have never seen a cd last more than a few years, or one single touch with a finger on the shiny side.

On the other hand, I've yet to have a Blu-ray fail[0], despite treating some of them rather poorly. This is just with factory-pressed discs though, I have yet to burn one. Has anyone else here had more experience with BD-Rs?

[0]which use more advanced coating such as Durabis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durabis

Well, if you're going to go to a cartridge style format, the competition is hard disks, which can store three or four terabytes each in a highly reliable form; sure, they cost more per disc, but the upfront costs are very low; I suspect the volume at which cartridges would become cheaper is larger than the market would support.

Hard disks are also not very good at long term storage, I believe most aren't designed to hold their magnetic charge for decades without being powered and rewritten.

Sure, but the same is true of every high-density medium. You have to either accept data storage is a dynamic process of repeated copying, or else do it the old-fashioned way and store your data on acid-free paper.

(Well, unless you want to use one of the exotic technologies that etch your data on metal plates or whatever; but in practice, paper is a lot cheaper.)

For the same reason that the most common way of storing information before the CD was a disc where you scratched waveforms directly into the vinyl: a plastic disc with a thin film on top is super-simple and cheap to mass produce.

Yes, but it's bad for archiving data. My general experience with CDs and DVDs is that two out of every three you burn will be unreadable the moment you burn them and the third one will be readable exactly ten times before it stops being readable, too.

That was alright when I just needed to move data around, or wanted to watch a movie once or twice, but I can't use something that unreliable for archiving.

Sounds like you were using bad media, at least for CD-Rs (DVD recordable media pushes the technology too far and is inherently less reliable). Unless they're Made in Japan Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, which cost around 25 cents per disk last time I bought a bunch a few years ago, or maybe Mitsui/MAM-A media, I would expect those sorts of problems. For DVD recordable media, nothing but Mitsui/MAM-A Gold is worth trying.

I've never had an unrecoverable error with Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs. I just recently pulled 8 out of cold storage with no problems aside from one marginal DVD-R drive, that were burned from 7/13/04 to various dates in 2008. If you want I can check from earlier in the decade, although my first batch of discs were Kodak Gold. I systematically burned and carefully stored about 4,000 during the last decade so I've got a lot to choose from ^_^.

Wait, so you had no problems at all, except for the problems you did have, which apparently work out to something like a 12% failure rate over 6-10 years?

That's not really a great endorsement.

No. Right now I have one marginal Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B DVD drive bought back in August 2011. By simply not using that drive, e.g. a 2007 Pioneer DVD drive, or a new "Samsung", my media has always read fine.

OK, the blanket "I've never had an unrecoverable error" is not true if include "on every drive I've tried them on", but then again this is the only drive that's ever started failing on me before it was replaced in the normal course of events. So my success rate in getting my data back without serious recovery efforts, over 14 years minus 5 months, is 100%. But I should go check some of those oldest disks again, it's been a year or two since I've retrieved stuff from the very early oughts.

I don't consider this to be a big thing, given these are commodity consumer drives which will continue to be manufactured to read CDs for the foreseeable future, especially compared to tape, where bad drives are known to eat them and they don't have one old format frozen in time (granted, CD-Rs are less reflective than pressed CDs)....

> My general experience with CDs and DVDs is that two out of every three you burn will be unreadable the moment you burn them

Just a few weeks ago I actually took my old spindles of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs out of storage and moved into Amazon Glacier. The disks had dates from 1999-2007. My results were that out of 80 or so discs, 5 of them had unrecoverable errors (thank god for dd_rescue).

These were burned in my youth, so the method I picked disc brands was "the cheapest disks that aren't those uncoated foil noname ones"

If you're seeing a 66% failure rate, may I suggest replacing your faulty burner or reader? I've yet to experience an instantly unreadable CD/DVD that I've burned, whether using the burned disc in the same drive or another system's drive.