Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
I have many 30 year old CDs. They’re fine. They’ve just been kept in a typical home storage environment. I just ripped a Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I bought in 93.
Very good - the stamped ones should last longer. Most of my cd-roms from that era are showing some bit rot.
So I'm getting a bit fascinated by this question, because I can do practical tests -- I've owned CD-Rs since the format was invented w/ the original Pinnacle SCSI CD writers circa 1994.
I don't think I have any CD-Rs that old any more, but I definitely have many from that era. Just for the heck of it, I popped an azo CD-R in my drive that I wrote in 1998, and I happen to have a hard drive copy of these files that I've carried forward on hard disks since that time as well (the CD-R was a backup).
I think the files are still in perfect condition -- was able to copy w/ verify all 360MB of MP3s (and yes, before you ask, I was making MP3s in 1998 using the Fraunhofer DOS command-line encoder), and compare them to my hard drive copies which show matching SHA512 hashes.
If I'm still around 25 years from now, I'll try again :-)
On one hand, it’s not a question of “if”, right, it’s only a question of “when”. Same for hard drives. The failure rate is 100%, eventually.
With analog media, one of the trade-offs is so long as the physical media is maintained, the information will be maintained. (Such as it is - another trade off is analog isn’t bit-for-bit true-to-source.)
Storage mediums like crystal and DNA are fascinating for that reason as well. A “permanent” digital storage doesn’t exist afaik.
You claim induced me to do a little tidying on my CD collection. I just copied the oldest data CD that I own: the Hugo & Nebula Anthology 1993. It copied & verified no problem.
Unfortunately, that's probably the oldest proper test I can do. Although I was using CD-ROMs as early as 1986, e.g. in libraries, I didn't own any music or data CDs until about 1990. I could re-rip some of those old music CDs, I suppose, but I'm not sure it would tell us much as I'm not sure how to do a bit-for-bit comparison and I certainly don't want to listen to the files.
Same. I recently fucked up a server migration and lost my entire digital library, so I'm going through my CD collection and re-ripping them. Haven't had a single problem, and many are over 20 years old.