Safe to store DVDs in closet?

[cloudff7]

I store my DVD discs inside the black dvd box in vertical position and inside the cardboard box, also inside the cardboard box next to the dvdbox I have a bag with papers and screwdrivers, on top of the cardboard box I have another one cardboard box with dvd casebox, the cardboard boxes are on top of a clothes closet and if I open the clothes closet door it shakes will this balance damage the DVD discs?

 

[autodidact]

Beware!
DVD beetles will eat through your clothes and cardboard boxes and then your DVD collection which will collapse in notime and there will only be dust left...
Only thing that will survive are your screwdrivers...
Your best option is to backup your entire DVD collection to a non mechanical harddrive (SSD) that will last a 1000 years.

 

[cloudff7]

???

 

[coopervid]

I store my DVD discs inside the black dvd box in vertical position and inside the cardboard box, also inside the cardboard box next to the dvdbox I have a bag with papers and screwdrivers, on top of the cardboard box I have another one cardboard box with dvd casebox, the cardboard boxes are on top of a clothes closet and if I open the clothes closet door it shakes will this balance damage the DVD discs?

Uh, I think you didn't get the joke . You seem to be the new voodoo master if screwdrivres and clothes should help with the storage life of your discs. Firstly, you have to distinguish between commercial (pressed) discs and discs you burned at home. Commercial discs are not very critical to deteriorate. Home burned discs are. It depends both on the discs used and your writer. Therefore the recommendation for backups is: Short term on discs is OK. Long term you should at least have 2 copies on 2 different hard drives as a minimum.

 

[cloudff7]

verbatim mdisc dvd

 

[coopervid]

They are advertised to have a long life. However, if the burn strategy of your drive and these M-discs don't provide good writing results you also have no good reading results and over time it gets worse. Let me check wit @njweb if he ever did a quality scan with M-discs on his LiteOn drive.I'm currently not aware of anybody who did such a scan with M-discs. A computer magazine here in Germany did some professional checks with professional hardware and the results were not promising. So 2 backups on 2 hard drives which is also actually cheaper than these super-expensive discs.

 

[cloudff7]

eu tested read test with nero discspeed and imgnurm and 100% good

 

[coopervid]

No, not good enough. It needs a low level test as shown in the BD50 thread.

 

[cloudff7]

so my discs DVD MDisc Verbatim were all burned with errors and i burned in 4x and imgburn verify no errors and nero discspeed read test 100% good

even with these results should the discs be discarded?

 

[coopervid]

You just can't tell by your assumptions and burn results. These programs just burn to disc and don't check if a lot of error correction is needed to read the data back. If a lot of error correction is needed the probability is high that after a couple of years and aging, error correction might nor work anymore when aging errors add to initial errors.

 

[cloudff7]

is the probability of errors high for my case? these errors is easy to occur on mdisc dvd verbatim?

which program to use for testing?

 

[coopervid]

Why don't you read:

https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/bd-50gb.80418/

 

[cloudff7]

I never used Pioneer drive in my city it's hard to find it, I had LG and Lite-On to burn MDisc DVD Verbatim

Does burning MDisc at low speeds 4x help or hurt in generating burn errors?

 

[coopervid]

If you have an appropriate LiteOn you can run the disc checks yourself.

 

[cloudff7]

I don't know how to check

 

[coopervid]

I guess we should have private conversation until this makes some progress. We can then share the results.

 

[mmdavis]

I don't know how to check

I have burned DVDs that are 20 years old, placed in DiscSox Pro sleeves that still play just as good as when originally burned. The main issues for longevity is to use a very good quality blank (mine are Taiyo Yuden Premium), store out of sunlight, and in a protected environment (like sleeves or a case). Mine are stored on end in a tray so there is no weight or pressure applied anywhere. If you are stacking boxes on top of the box you have DVDs in, those would be better off in a DVD case, as that would protect them better with the weight being applied. That takes up a lot of room though.

Also, a little shaking of the box shouldn't do any harm. The box falling over probably would. The DVD would most likely come off the little spindle holding it in place and start sliding around inside the case. That could cause some scratching issues on the disc(s).

 

[Swazirs]

I wouldn't trust online services, tomorrow they may go out of business or delete your data on a whim. We don't really own anything that is online, every ebook I bought was copied to strip the DRM, AMZ once (in fact, more than once) did a remote deletion from a buyer, he was refunded, but won a lawsuit. Then there are many stuff that we buy, yet it's only a license of use and eventually it's censored or removed from the streaming service.

Not to mention the fact that if you don't want 2 but 5 TB, while this is a 150% increase in disk space, Google will charge you 400% more for that plan.

In theory, flash drives/HDDs/SSDs are perfect, in reality they may die suddenly without any warning, and recovering lots of data is impossible in most cases. Even if you hire the FBI, it's like recovering deleted files (for good), you'll waste money/time and achieve nothing. If we are dealing with terabytes of data, I'd say it's unwise to concentrate everything into a single unit. 50 blank discs (25 GB each) hold 1150 GB if I am not mistaken. If you burn hundreds of discs your chances are probably better than trusting one of these "modern" devices.

They may last many years if you are lucky, and keep them in your drawer/store and handle properly, but no one can tell if they aren't going to die and corrupt your stuff after the 4th use. So it's a waste of time and money, in my view, for COLD STORAGE, to trust even SSDs (don't start me on how awful HDD technology is...).

I might as well buy one drive now, store all my files and leave it untouched until 2032, only to find out it would die after little use anyway, due to a hidden defect. And even if that doesn't happen, let's all assume this is the most reliable drive EVER MADE, it can die for one of those reasons:

6 Worst Reasons for Hard Disk Failure and Data Recovery Solutions | Stellar

Reasons of hard disk failure and subsequent solutions to perform easy hdd recovery using Stellar Data Recovery Software.

www.stellarinfo.com

I know about this one very well:

ELECTRONIC FAILURE OR POWER SURGE

If this happens, anything can be fried, including your expensive GPU.

Even if a lightning struck your computer, only one disk at a time would be affected, the others would remain intact.

And you aren't going to drop 50+ discs at the same time, but if you do that to a HDD or SSD, chances are, you are f----.

You will not recover anything useful, I bet, if something suddenly affects these drives, in 80% of cases.

USB flash drives are also unreliable, any tiny thing not behaving as it should in your PC, will make them erratic. Like once, when someone told me to check a fake one with wrong capacity, and only because I tried to use a normal pendrive later, that one had some data corrupted. F-------- USB ports!

I gotta ask (for real) if ditching them for any use at all, if abandoning optical media, was a good idea. Just like ditching DVDs/BDs/UHDs and rental stores, and only investing in streaming.

This is what we get when we rely on HDDs (a few reviews):

**************
-Started making a clicking noise when moving files after a couple weeks of use
-Useless!

-Overall worst HDD Ive ever owned do to clicking and freezing. I expected a lot more from WD. I only used the drive a few times in the past couple weeks before it started with the issue. newegg wont replace do to 30 day money back guarantee, im at 35 today. This is ridiculous, money thrown out.
**************

Horribly cheap components, it died within the first year. It just makes a noise like it's trying to load and craps out, can't get it to be recognized on any machine.
**************

For cold storage, which is what I am aiming (the other "hot" copy I was thinking of buying HDD and SSD), even if your Hard Drive manage to survive for many years, if you put so much data in one location, you'll risk too much if any of those "Murphy laws" apply:

- If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

- Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

While this one I think it's more suitable for optical media:

- If anything can't go wrong on its own, someone will make it go wrong.

I am not saying discs are perfect, it's just that unless many of the same batch are defective and they start corrupting years after you checked them, and found to be OK, chances are the contents you saved in those dozens of discs will still be there many years later, if you store them properly.

 

[cartman0208]

Bottomline is: store-and-forget is the wrong approach.
From my experience as a systems administrator a good way (not the best) is:
-Have your data online on a raid, so in case one hdd fails, you can rebuild it without downtime.
-have the same data on the same or similar system in another location synchronized, to have a backup if your primary location dies
-make a regular cold backup (DVDs, BDs or HDDs/SSDs) and store it in a save location, to have at least any state of data if everything goes wrong

Yes it's an expensive approach, but it gives a certain safety.

 

[TubeBar]

I have burned DVDs that are 20 years old, placed in DiscSox Pro sleeves that still play just as good as when originally burned. The main issues for longevity is to use a very good quality blank (mine are Taiyo Yuden Premium), store out of sunlight, and in a protected environment (like sleeves or a case). Mine are stored on end in a tray so there is no weight or pressure applied anywhere. If you are stacking boxes on top of the box you have DVDs in, those would be better off in a DVD case, as that would protect them better with the weight being applied. That takes up a lot of room though.

Also, a little shaking of the box shouldn't do any harm. The box falling over probably would. The DVD would most likely come off the little spindle holding it in place and start sliding around inside the case. That could cause some scratching issues on the disc(s).

The Taiyo Yuden were the best, I still have a lot burned on those. Most of my 25+ old CDs died over the years by improper storage (cracked). I used to be lazy and store them on Spindles and those would wind up falling or getting hit w/ something. Properly stored is vital. A good disc and a good quality burn won't mean much if it is stored like I did.

I tried copying the disc and it exploded in my drive, if I had to do that again w/ a cracked disc I'd read at 1x. Still cracked discs are dead discs to me. Fortunately wasn't a lot of discs like that.

Bottomline is: store-and-forget is the wrong approach.
From my experience as a systems administrator a good way (not the best) is:
-Have your data online on a raid, so in case one hdd fails, you can rebuild it without downtime.
-have the same data on the same or similar system in another location synchronized, to have a backup if your primary location dies
-make a regular cold backup (DVDs, BDs or HDDs/SSDs) and store it in a save location, to have at least any state of data if everything goes wrong

Yes it's an expensive approach, but it gives a certain safety.

That's the ideal way to do it. You can never have to many backup copies.