That thing was used as a drink coaster
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
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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?
you can also, like, keep them in a humidity-free environment and, you know, back them up. Which you can't do with call-home, DRM'd download-only digital copies.
seriously though, if your discs look like this, you're doing an extremely poor job looking after them
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.
Greentext is reductive, but at the same time DVDs and optical media in general are a paradox. In theory, they will last forever, but at the same time there are so many ways to fuck up with them that they're basically only good as like a plan Z storage for really important files that you wrap in cardboard and leave in the closet.
You said you didn’t make a copy of ISO?
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.
God, it hurts to see that CD. I remember when I was a kid, I had PS1 games that my uncle recorded into CDs and some of the time they would get spots all over.
One of my current DVD-RW discs (for live CDs) has disc rot on the edges. It's the only one with the issue. I wonder what really causes it, aside from humidity in the ambient.
Looks like a recordable disc that has gone bad. Pressed CDs, DVDs and BDs should last a pretty long while.
I've dd copied all my playstation 2 disks to a NAS, because they were getting old. Running those games on the ps2 off an external disk is a lot more effort than just putting the disc in though, so they are still my main goto
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Freepsxboot and verbatim cd-r with burner
Still better than relying to a third party server that can and will eventually shutdown and not let you download your licensed data anymore.
Not to mention being completely at the mercy of forced updates which can ruin your favorite game at any moment. People bitch about having to install from disks and patch manually, but I value that freedom and control.
For example, for me, Company of Heroes peaked at 1.71. This is fine because I simply install it from disk, apply the two patches required to get it to 1.71, and play the game exactly how I like it forever. I wish I could do the same thing with some modern games, which have been ruined by developers who don't know when to stop tinkering with their work.
Only GOG seems to be allowing for the old way of installation for new triple-A releases. I'll never be forced to install any particular version of The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 because I have the offline installers and all the incremental patches saved.
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This picture gives me severe anxiety
To comfort you, this CD appears to be an empty disc which was either under water for a long period of time or forgotten in a basement or similar. No data was lost probably as it was empty to begin with.
Wrap a box in aluminum foil -bam= Faraday cage on the cheap
Happy cake day!
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Yeah no shit, nothing lasts forever. Doesn't stop me from preserving everything as best as I can tho.
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aye same thing happened to my car i supposedly would be able to own forever. I left it out in the yard for ten years and now it looks like something bonnie and clyde got shot to death in.
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I have never seen a factory pressed CD/DVD fail. Optical media is the most reliable.
I bought a CD boxset of all the MAD Magazine issues from launch until the late 90s (when I bought it). About 8 years later I still had it and attempted to back it up into ISOs It was like 6 discs and of course disc 5 was unreadable so the entire thing was useless :-/
Hmm, there might be some procedures to help you to get them backed up to ISOs, even if they seem unreadable. What program did you try to use to make the ISOs?
I have no idea, this was like 15 years ago haha It was probably Nero or Roxio. At this point I'm sure I could download the whole collection from somewhere.
I recommend using Alcohol 120% since it has an option to ignore reading errors. Other programs just stop when encountering an error.
Although, yeah, it is probably already archived somewhere on the internet, but you never know.
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Oddly enough there is a specific album, live's secret samadhi, that I've never found a rippable copy of. I've found like five copies over the past half decade at used record stores, all in seemingly perfect condition in terms of lack of scratches, but they won't play correctly all the way through or rip correctly. Could be anecdotal bad luck, but I think the cd pressing of that album has bit rot in general for some reason. I've not seen that on any other factory discs I've ripped.
If it is the same album always, all of the copies were probably manufactured cheaply or deficiently.
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You own the game forever so do protect it yourself.
thats why i dont bother about collecting games anymore XD
I am a big believer that physical media is dead and there is no reason to have it anymore. This is one of them.
Then I realized that I cannot stream the movie "dogma" anywhere outside of Kodi. My wife and I tried to rent/buy it on Prime the other night and its not available anywhere
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rookie mistake :3