CD and DVD Disintegration Revisited

About 18 months ago, an artist friend gave me a CD containing some scans of her original work. She needed a few prints done which I gladly did for her. She called me recently and need a couple more prints. When I tried to access the CD, I could not get it to read the files. I used two different computers with four different CD/DVD drives in an effort to get her job done. Nada. I finally ran a scan on the disk itself using one of the tools in the V-Com System Suite 7.

The final result was that there were several bad spots on the CD and it could no longer be used. It had been properly store during the last 18 months...in a jewel case, standing vertically and stored in a drawer in a normal, temperature-controlled environment. It had suffered what is rightly or wrongly termed CD Disintegration. Oh, and by the way, the brand name on the CD was Hewlett Packard.

It has been a while since I touched on this subject so I thought today was a good day to revisit it. When burnable CD's were first introduced several years ago, we were told that this media has a long life and we can expect safe storage for at least 100 years. Over time, this has turned out not to be true in about 99% of the cases. Most burned CD's have a much, much shorter lifetime.

Here are some hard truths you need to know about CD-R's and CD-RW's:

1. Music CD's that you buy in stores are not burned like we burn CD's in our computers. They are pressed, much like the old LP records that CD's replaced. Therefore you normally don't have to worry about their disintegration as they have an entirely different chemical composition. Same with commercial DVD's.
   
2. In most cases, the quality of CD's is directly related to its price. The cheaper the disks, the shorter their lifespan.
3. In 98% of the cases, the true manufacturer of a blank CD is not the company whose name appears on the label.
   
4. Companies whose name is on the label of a CD constantly change manufacturers, even those who had reputations for quality. For instance, I have told a lot of people that CD's sold under the TDK label were very good...and they were. They were one of the few CD sellers that manufactured its own disks. The last batch of TDK CD's that I bought at Costco were manufactured by a third rate CD company in India.
5. As a rule, blank DVD's, even good ones, have a much shorter life than CD's. A good rule of thumb is about 1/3 less lifetime.
   
6. Never use CD-RW or DVD-RW for archival storage as they have a much shorter lifespan.
7. If you wish to use DVD's for a storage media, get the best possible brand you can, then make sure it is DVD+R, rather than DVD-R. DVD+R has superior error correction and writing method.
8. Most commercial CD/DVD burning software will give you the option to verify a disk after it is burned. Make sure you do it.

I first became aware of CD disintegration a few years ago when some of my backup CD's stopped working. As a professional artist and photographer, my backups are very important to me. The last thing I want is to lose client's work or my own work for that matter.

I started buying blank CD's years ago when they were on sale at stores like Fry's. They were generic, and cheap. The subject of CD disintegration had not cropped up yet. Recently, I examined the first 12 disks that I had used to back up my work over time. All of them had gone bad. In my case, it was not a major loss. Most of them contained digital scans of my slides and I still have my slides. The final versions of my artwork and photos are stored on three separate hard drives as well as these backup disks, so nothing important has really been lost. But still, I need quality backups that won't be lost over time.

Since I became aware of disk disintegration, I have been replacing my cheap disks with quality disks. I have also thrown away about 100 of the cheap blank disks, having learned my lessons. I keep a few around for non-archival jobs, but they are separated from my good disks.

Most writeable CD's and DVD's are manufactured in the Far East by companies that you have never heard of. As mentioned above, they label them with the brand name of the company that ordered them produced. There are several different types of chemical compositions of CD's, some much worse than others. So how do you know who manufactured the disks you are buying?

For DVD's, I use a program called DVD Identifier, which is a free download from the creator's Website. It reads the manufacturer's information off the disk. For most of us, the name means little or nothing. But you can look up the info on another website (too long to name) that has taken the time to tell you whether a particular manufacturer is good, bad, or something in between.

For CD's, I use a program that came with my Nero CD/DVD burning software called Nero CD-DVD Speed. It not only identifies the manufacturer, but will test what transfer speed is best for the particular disk. I recently found out you can download this for free at cdspeed200.com.

In the next chapter of this blog, I will tell you which brand(s) of CD and DVD media you can reliably use to make long-lasting archivals of your data. In the meantime, perhaps you should check on your own CD's and DVD's that you made two or more years ago to see if they are still good. You may be in for some nasty surprises.