Comment by easyThrowaway
1 month ago
'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.
Also we've started seeing some of the first wave of "properly made" CDs from the 1970s/1980s degrade. 45-50 years is a good, long run, but it is certainly not "forever".
and anything you "burnt" yourself has an even shorter life.
In many ways our storage media has become more ephemeral as capacities have increased - except LTO at least which seems to keep up with storage demands/price and durability, LTO is eternal (or long enough to be able to move it from LTO-(N-4) to LTO-N at least).