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This a relatively old article by David Pogue on The New York Times site, but the problem is timeless. We hate to think of all those individuals saving precious home videos or photos of their family growing up onto DVD’s without realizing that technology has an expiration date. Even knowing about the limited longevity, the lifespans of these optical disks aren’t predictable. Tests have shown them to last a couple of years, like the case in this blog article, but have also shown disks that lasted a matter of months. Don’t put an expiration date on the videos, photos and files you want to last forever.

Phil McKinney from Forbes.com has touched on a topic that we are, needless to say, very passionate about, data storage. His article covers the major concerns with just how fragile CDs, DVDs, hard drives and other optical storage devices are. Not fragile in the sense that they easily break if you drop them or data is ruined if you scratch your discs, but the catastrophic degradation these discs suffer from simply being stored. Whether its in your office on the shelf, at home in a file cabinet or stacked in cases on your desk, these current optical devices are breaking down from heat, humidity and even light.

Terry Hancock from Free Software Magazine recently reviewed the M-DISC and the M-WRITER.  His article goes into some depth about the controversial lifespan and use of optical media.  The read is worth your time and helps put the M-DISC into perspective with other optical media discs.

This is the title of a BBC news article by David Reid, a reporter for BBC Click. This article discusses the difficulty of storing digital information on optical media such as CDs and DVDs. Where other recordable media wear out due to use, optical media fails randomly without this issue of physical damage, since nothing but a laser “touches” the disc. He also reviews what would need to happen in order to keep your data “alive” by rotating your media every few years. The feasibility of this is questions.