Do burned CDs and DVDs have a shelf life?

Claiming no expertise on this issue, I have just checked reports that I did in 1998 on gold coloured media, and they are working flawlessly.

Have a purple disc from 2003 and it too, is working fine.

Media has been stored in an aluminium ?briefcase?, stored in a house and later in a commercial building, in New South Wales, Australia.

Do I transfer what I want to keep to new discs? I have no idea, but will look at when I get some time! )

The problem could be solved by getting your P.C set-up with a RAID system . Similar to a car with a spare tire . Hopefully this is an effective allernative option to dvd's / cd's . I've got 2 terabyte drives in my P.C for plenty of room .if I get a hard drive failure then I have a backup that is immediate and effective .

I have had a pc for only about four years. My first notebook was an Acer Travel Mate on which I used to play Sims. At one point I backed up all my game files onto RW CD and moved them from a desktop to the notebook. One major file failed to burn properly and I lost all the information.
Once I had the game up and running I stored copies of all downloaded "object" files for my game on RW CD. When I downloaded more objects I added them to the disk. One day the disk informed me that it was "full", but that there was "nothing on it". It turned out to have developed a "bad sector" and that was that. My back up files were all lost. This was a cheap RW CD bought from a local budget price store. I wiped the disk and stupidly used it again, thinking it a fluke. For a second time I lost everything on it when the same problem developed. As I loaded the disk for a split second I could see the files, then nada. All gone, disk "full", unusable.
I have my game stored on RW CDS still. Every month I backed up my game files by wiping the previous back up disk completely and reburning. Not sure what condition they will be it if I ever reload on my new notebook.
I also tried to burn a favourite cd onto a new disk when someone scratched the original beyond recovery. Halfway through strange noises developed and I was never able to burn that music back off my notebook onto a disk. I used to have problems reading my game disk, and the old notebook was incapable of burning music successfully onto CD.
Mostly I use floppies for storage of Word files because they overwrite so easily. And I've had them suddenly go bad and lose everything. The index fails, or so I was told. I have a novel sitting about in my house - it's on two separate sets of floppies stored in separate places and also in hard copy. There's still much to be said for paper storage. At least you get a visual warning if it starts to decay.

Well, I must say this is like the second time the CD or DVD going bad and lost all my data has come up. If your old as dirt like me you probably remember the panic when someone (Probably a manufacturer) said that if your are storing movies or home movies on VHS tapes, Don't be surprised if after 4 or 5 years the tapes are Blank! Yeah everything has a shelf life! Including us! What?s it 75 to 85 years now and our bodies give out and we quit working! LOL Well, Just my past experience, I have been involved with electronics, Audio and Video recorders, to PCs hard drives (They are only good for 5 years if your lucky ask any manufacturer!) Digital Video tapes and now down to CDs CDRW DVD and DVDRW, and have never, ever ran into an (unexpected) <key word. Problems with any recording media in the time frame the manufacturer states in their ads or on the box. Oh I forgot the old Floppy drives! Not the little 1.40 meg but the Big 4.5 360 kb disks, the ones you could find in the driveway and mangled, yet you could take the cardboard or plastic covering off of the media and slide it into the drive and Bingo there?s your data and it would work just fine until given to Godzilla and burned up, it was kind of hard to put the ashes into the drive! Point is, for me anyway is if you keep your media out of the Sun! Out of the elements! Away from Kids, Dogs and even cats from using them as toys your data will probably still be there and good as ever when you go to use or retrieve it.
Make 2 or 3 copies? Always! And Keep them at different locations, Incase of fire, kids, dogs, cats, etc.
Don't leave them in the glove box or (I love this one) Do NOT put them in the package tray under the rear window glass in Phoenix AZ. on a mild summer day of 122 degrees and the interior of your White car is 168 to 200 degrees! (Yes you can cook an egg there and eat it!) We have done this as tests and if the case of the device like Dat tapes and CD ROMs where melted and would not fit into the drive any more, yeah good chance you lost everything! Although we did get a melting CD out of a car, open the case, drop the CD on a Flat desk and set some heave Windows Books on it till it cooled off and we where able to read data from the CD with no problems. This would fall under (Don't try this at home!) things.
For me, and this is just my opinion, If your storing important data to CD, DVD or Tape, And after 5 years you haven't needed it? You probably never will! I also worked for a major bank for 17 years and we did backups 2 or 3 times a day usually at least 2 to 3 copies, 1 went to a data storage vault. 1 went to our off site Disaster recovery site. And 1 stayed at the data center so if Sally called @ 4:30PM and said she accidentally deleted her Address Book, we could fix her up before she went home.
For home use, again if you haven't looked at the data in 5 years? Good chance Windows has crashed 3 or 5 times by then and you have rebuilt the system and the files are out dated? Or if there is stuff you can't replace like videos of the kids and family, that's up to you if you have it on tape, make another copy every 5 years or so, or burn your tapes to DVD?s and make copies of the DVD?s every 5 years or so. You can copy your (Can't Replace Stuff) to a spear or external HD and disconnect it and put it away and Only hook it up if you need the data off of it, course there is always the chance that the HD will DIE when you hook it back up! (Believe me it happens!) So What? What do I do to protect my data, pic's and movies I absolutely cannot replace? Well, Depends on how much its worth to you and how much you can spend to keep your data safe. There are now hundreds if not thousands of WEB sites that will SELL you drive space on there servers and you upload your stuff there and let them worry about backing up and keeping your data safe, remember you get what you pay for, no more, no less. If you use a cheep site for your data, ask about insurance or can you get your data back after they have gone out of business?
I just take the effort to back up my data CD, DVD, HD, or Tape, what ever I have handy and then I keep the disks in a safety deposit box or a fire proof safe! Oh! Just cause it says it fire proof for documents, keep in mind the plastic melts, tapes melt, and hard drive components fail long before the flash point of paper! So I have given you about as many options as I can think of just now and if you guest my age then you know that the first thing to go is the mind! For the life of me I can't remember the second thing! (O:
That's the key! Don't worry about it! Life is TOO short to worry about the things beyond your control. Along with your home movies or digital pictures, take some Polaroid?s and keep them in a photo album so if you loss everything else you and open the photo album and your memories should fill in the rest, after that no one will care or want to remember anyway, they are YOUR memories after all. But do the best you can afford to save your data, if you feel good making copies every 2 years or 5 years do that; Chances are you will NOT have any problems with your CD, DVD, HD Storage, or Tape, in your life time! The odds are in your favor that you will die first or your house will burn down with everything in it! So you start Over, Don't shorten your life by stressing out that the CD or DVD you made 5 years ago won?t be any good if you rush in and looked for the data tomorrow.
I have Lots and Lots and Lots of VHS tapes from 30 to 40 years ago and when that thing that came out back then that these indestructible VHS Cassettes where going to go bad just sitting in your closet!? I about Died! Call 911! I was chasing in the chips! All the stuff, Home Movies of the kids, all the movies I copied from none copy able Rental VHS tapes that I rented and copied and saved incase I ever wanted to see that movie again! ALL that work Gone!
You know what? Yeah it was all still there! I took one of the VHS Tapes that was already 15 years old, my shaking hand! I had to steady myself as I pushed the tape into the VSR; I turned the TV channel to 4 and waited! And waited! And just when I was saying to my self, "Self!" "Its All Gone" The Sound came up and the screen lit up and there was my Movie! Or my kids Video, Just as good as the day I recorded it! Oh man, Shorten my life buy at least 5 years I figure! And for what? If it had been blank I can go down to the video store and rent a DVD of any old move you can think of! And if the kids playing in the sprinkler was gone? Well, I have my memories, just like my Dad and Mom did of my playing in the yard and if they where lucky they had some old 35 mm to save me on! (O: Works for me.
Oh, one last thing, a while back when this CD DVD thing first surfaced I think it was like 10 or 15 years ago, or when ever the DVD took off and everyone was so happy, until this NUT got on TV and said: "Oh Yeah," "These plastic disks are the best!" "Durable, easy to store and good for at least 4 or 5 years!" Man! DO you remember the panic! All over again now For nothing! To make things worse last week my wife was wanting to look up some older little league pictures (We take pictures of all the teams and games etc.) and some one wanted more prints and she put the disk in and ... yeah you got it, "Error Reading Date from Drive: E Please insert a NEW Disk! Well!! Before I could get to her she had already started pulling her heir out and yelling at me! Because Everyone TOLD Her them Disks Could go BAD and whom was she going to believe ME? Heck, I was out numbered! I got her to come down enough to go for a walk while I antilized the situation! Well, First thing is I ran to my Game PC and stuffed the disk in the old drive and Bada-Boom-Bada-Bang! EVERYTHING was right there! Her Dumb CD/DVD Drive had taken a Cr$^$ Well, Went bad with out warning! Heck she was just listening to an Audio CD before this? I Re-Booted, Cooled Booted and even kicked it a few times the CD/DVD Drive was DEAD! I ripped the case apart, played taps for the dead drive and dumped it in the recycle bin and installed a new spare drive I keep in a drawer for just such an occasion and when she got home, All here pics where right there on the CD where they had always been! (I tolled her I just cleaned the disk and as soon as she was done I would make a new backup copy of it!) (O: LOL
I guess, in closing If you should get some old media out of the closet and you try to view or play it, and it don't work? Before you go running down the street with your hair on fire! Try it in another reader or player, it will, the odds say work just fine.
I test this stuff on myself! Better me then my clients! I get out and play 40-year-old VHS tapes, 30-year-old tape back up tapes, all kinds, 20 year and older CD's DVD's even RWs I trust them the least as so many different things can affect them. Write once are SO cheep why not just burn 2 or 3 copies? And I even still have some old original Real-to-Real tapes and some (Do You need the Way-Back-Machine?) 4 and 8 track tapes, recorders etc. and ALL work and continue to work as well as the day I recorded them! The only ones I have had fail and this includes the cheapest ones I could buy! (Big Clue here, if the Cheap CDs or DVD?s you bought give you errors trying to format or record to them, yeah it?s a safe bet they are no good and will not last!) But, by far the ones that actually failed had been played with by my kids growing up! (Remember the Ad where the kid feeds the VCR a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cause he said it was hungry!) Yeah safe bet that player will no longer play any other VCRs no matter how old they where! LOL I caught my African gray parrot trying to help me put CDs away one day and that was nice until I realized he was accidentally scraping all this funny looking shiny stuff off the disks! Yeah they where not readable ether.
But everything else was and still is! The player or drive for the media in question will most likely fail before the media or disks will! And that's my fact, proven by the some 40-year-old media I have that is still working just fine! Extend your life; take a deep breath and sometimes you just gota say what the Frack!
P.S. If you?re old enough, going way back! I remember a time when I was in my room listing to my Beatles or Rolling Stones LPs (Remember them?) And some guy starts blasting on the radio that LP's would only last 4 or 5 years of normal playing! LOL Well, Yeah I mean the diamond needle cuts plastic out of the little audio groves every time you play the record right? Well? OK everything taken within Resin OK? I had a girl friend that played her favorite 45 at least 300 times a day for like a year! And yeah when I try to play it today some of the quality of the music is just not there and there is a lot of hissing noise! (O:
Nuf Said! Thanks for reading, Hope you Enjoyed, Good Luck with your Data!
Have Fun; Life is too short for anything less.
Merlin289.

I have just had this problem I thought it was a driver problem but the computer manufacturer said it was the drive on my lap top so I changed it for another same problem.
I then went on Microsoft's website and entered the error code in the search box this brought uo a utility to fix it,took all of 30 seconds to do so.
Moral of the story,go to the top first.

Disks have a life span of about 10 years in normal conditions, but the final result can be different. Some disks claim to last 100 years provided in the right conditions.
To get the maximum life span out of a normal CD / DVD:
1. Don't use a hard tip pen to write on it
2. Don't try/prevent scratching (of) BOTH sides of the disc
3. Don't leave the disk under sunlight
4. Don't leave the disk in high humidity
5. Don't leave the disk under high pressure
6. Don't leave the disk in areas where it can get wet
7. Don't let the disk fall on the group.
8. Don't let the disk in extreme temperatures (Although this is very unlikely, -5 - 50 degrees Celsius is fine.)
9. Don't leave oil on the disk (incl. hand oil; i.e. fingerprints)
10. Don't burn the disk (as in fire, not in CD/DVD writing)
11. Keep the disk away from dust.

Verbatim claims to have a lifetime warranty although I 'suspect' it is valid only when you follow the above rules strictly.

If you have lots of money to waste and want to experiment, you could burn a DVD, buy a DVD-ROM creator machine, insert your DVD, and it will 'press' your data onto a DVD-ROM, like what those companies do to make those CD-ROM games. Pressed DVDs last longer than DVD burnt with dye 'in theory'.

In the 60's we started recording 3600" reel to reel so we didn't have to change the albums all the time. Of those recordings, none of the 1.75 ips (inches per second) tapes played after 20 years. Some 3.5 ips played and all the 7 ips played after 20 years. I have one reel I keep for nostalgia, but I tossed the rest. Too brittle and too much trouble. (Someone want a Sony 260 Reel to Reel, 1967 vintage?)

My friends and I have tens of thousands of albums collected over the years. We converted the Albums to CD's for others and kept their albums as the price. We have been converting them to CDR's for years.

I purchased my first 1:1 CD writer for $1500 in 1989 and since have experienced many types of media and drives.

First, All my ReWritable Disks over 5 years old have failed. I have a recovery software (Smith Micro) and an external Iomega drive I used to recover the data whenever possible then threw those expensive discs away. The Iomega will read where other drives won't and I can't explain why.

I buy and burn CDR's by the case. These are my rules after lots of heartbreaking data loss.

1. Use only CDR's or DVD-R media. Different color coatings don't seem to make a differece.

2. Never, and I'll say it again, NEVER put a paper label on a disk you want to keep more than a few years. I stomped my stomper years ago. Most of the discs I have lost other than the ReWritable's are ones that had a paper label.

3. Never scratch even the top of the CD like TDK. I have scratched the label on the top side of CD's and lost the disc data. Just to see if it was a fluke, I scratched a couple of other discs and when I scratched the TDK silver off the disc, they failed.

4. I always print my label before burning the disc. I have never used a lightscribe, but I print all my discs on Epson printers (320, RX680, RX700. No special markers. I print a complete label coating the whole disc down to the smallest hub. Ink is cheap on the internet and a small price to pay to always get play!

5. RIDATA is just a couple of miles from me and I now use their, no stacking hub, silver printable, exclusively. Silver Printable has only been around for about three years, but they allow total coating of the top. I used the white coated prior, but the silver is much prettier.

6. Always store in CD sleeves or Cases and do not leave in your car. At home I have 3" Binders with sleeves that hold 8 discs each. I have a 50 disc carrier with black pages I alternate dics in to take with me in the car.

Just for the record. The Mp3 discs with paper labels were the first to fail. All of my discs 1 through 119 have been lost and I tossed them when they would not play anymore. I had to re-record them all. At 10-12 albums per disc on mp3 format, I lost over 1000 albums. I do not remember the CD Quality discs even with paper labels failing as often. In fact I put one of my oldest on while I am writing this to see if it was going to play. Plays fine. Just like the reel to reel, the longer wave length recordings seem to hold up better in storage.

I have thousands of hours and thousands of discs in my music collection. I have everything backed up in CD Quality on 3 Terabyte discs and again on DVD-R's as a redundant backup. Our Album collections are always here if all else fails. Ain't nothing like a good backup.

I would highly recommend printing any DVD "BEFORE" burning. The wobble change after printing can cause those little distortion squares in your movie or pictures when you play it back if you print it after burning. The weight of the ink does strange things to playback.

I have a Sony 400 Disc Player I load for special occasions and holidays so everyone can hear something they want. I pull discs from lots of different binders, old and new and I haven't had a disc not play since I changed the recording format to CD Quality and fully printed labels.

I now use 6 Internal, Pioneer, Optiarc CD-DVD burners exclusively other than my USB Iomega I use for recovering data. When you burn as many discs as I do, you find out which ones can handle the load. I lost my last Sony during my Christmas session and replaced it with a Pioneer also. One other thing, the Pioneer always burns at 40X, not so with all the other burners I have had. It is tedious when you are burning 100 discs and after 3 or four discs a drive slows to 32X or even as low as 10X. And, it was not the media, it was the drive. The Pioneers using the exact media never slow down.

I used other white and silver printable discs but now use the RIDATA exclusively because they have been 100% burnable after printing the labels. Another annoying thing is to have discs show unwriteable after you spent the time printing them.

Probably more information than you wanted to read.

my PC stop reconiced the dvd same problem #4 please help me

my computer does not recognise the hard drive and cd rom. i tried to change the ide cable but still its not working.i checked the system settings both the hard drive and the cd rom are not found.when i boot the computer it gives me the "boot failure" message.i think it might be a virus.what must i do

I back up information to CDs not DVDs. CDs have at least a 10 yr shelf life probably even 20. The burn pits are large and the space between the pits is comfortable. I believe DVDs either fade or the burn spots 'bleed' and become less round or 'bleed together. Some DVDs have less than a year shelf life. I don't put anything on a DVD that I will need a year later unless I use an old DVD blank. I have a few hundred 2x blanks bought around 2000 when 4x made 2x obsolete. The slower the burn speed the better. The 'blue dye' used in Verbatim and other premium disks lasts longer. The fast burning dyes seem to have a short shelf life. I have stopped buying DVD disks because I do have a large store of blanks. I have/had many DVDs burned about 15 years ago that can still be read with difficulty. Maybe 7 yrs ago I discovered my oldest disks were going bad. Most could still be read but some of the blocks required many reads before the reader got it right. I backed the disks up. Now the backups are not readable while the old disks just take an hour+ to read. I have been in the process of moving every thing back to hard disks for the last few years. My most valuable data is backed up to CDs.

I am sure the burner does matter. I use a top of the line Plextor to burn made while they were still unmatched in performance. I find my Samsung BR burner can read what my plextor cant.