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Maximum real world longevity experience is still unknown as some claims of 100 years have obviously not passed. Practically, it seems likely that the discs, stored under optimal conditions, will easily endure far past the extinction of several generations of technology.

If you REALLY have to keep this data around there are much larger issues than worrying about the data on any reputable DVD, irrespective of the type (-, +-, -RW, etc).

Here's my real world example. I still have handful of "archived" original 360k 5 1/4 discs, maybe 15-20 years old, that still work. The data is fine but useless. I've not had a PC that even has one of those old drives much less still have a working copy of dBase, Quatro Pro, or Lotus 123 that would even load or run. Ditto on even the newer 1.2mb 3 1/2 discs.

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Burn Vista slower or risk data loss, warns Microsoft
Posted by Dan Bell on 10 July 2006 - 17:09 - Source: APC Start

D4rk0n3 used our news submit to tell us that Microsoft has warned beta testers in release notes, as recently as build 5456.5, to be sure and burn the Vista ISO at very low speeds. They say that a key reason they have found for installation failure, is corrupted or missing data, or at least the inability of the drives to read back the information from the media.

They are recommending burns at 1x or 2x in order to get a reliable result. They say that many DVD burners cannot burn reliably at high speed. We can read the notice in this quote from APC Data and also their thoughts on the issue.

When burning your DVD?s please do so at 1x or 2x and CRC them when done using the CRC utility posted on the Connect site. The customer experience improvement telemetry that we?ve been getting back on Beta 2 shows that not quite three quarters of setup failures are the result of a failure to read from the media. (End of Microsoft message)

Testing shows that burning at slower speeds greatly increases the chances of a good burn. It has been the subject of rumour for a long time that DVD burning is a risky way of backing up data, because the organic dye layers used in the disc are just that ? organic. They decompose over time, so that patches of a burned disc may become unreadable. But it has been difficult to get a picture for exactly how great the problem is: the CATS DVD analysers required to scientifically test burned DVDs are rare and incredibly expensive. But this sort of data from Microsoft is helpful: statistical analysis on such a wide base of people shows that data integrity on optical discs is a significant problem, even as soon as a disc is burned.

Hmmm, well I think this logic is a bit flawed. Any comments out there on why people are not getting good burns? You may also wish to ponder this issue in the Club CD Freaks Blank Media Forum. There's already a discussion going on in there, concerning this very subject.

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