What's the life expectancy of DVDs and DVD-Rs?

[broaddd]

I know it will depend on the brand, of course (I use Princo/Shintaro at the moment)...

But what is the typical life expectancy of DVD and DVD-R media?

Cheerio,
Bruce

[gmatov]

Ah, man, this question comes up every couple days.

They will last, depending on the brand, and we will not specify the brand, because no one has had a DVD long enough to know, KNOW, how long they will last, anywhere from 1 day to 1000 years if you listen to the hype.

NO ONE KNOWS. You have the media mfgs to tell you they'll last forever.

You have members here to tell you their CD-Rs are dying. So who do you believe? The mfg, who wants to sell garbage ? Or the uers here who say they are having problems 2 months down the road?

Best advice, back your disks up every third day. Almost guaranteed to be safe. Safer every other day unless you go to another partition on your drives.

[mopar7]

Ya, make 2 copies of unreplaceables (home videos, etc), on different brands....or don't.

[proxyx99]

Look how few (if any) companies still claim what Kodak did few yers ago with regard to their CDR gold media quality (were supposed to last 99 years "guaranteed"!). What's left of ot? If it's 10 or 27 or 65 or less then 1 year, who's going to get them by the balls and how?
Seems that, whether we like it or not, we are all drawn into playing a "lotto" game with our memories enstilled in the media. Take your chance and pray hard. On the other hand, still nothing beats good old photo print. It passed the test of time.

[spiderman2k1]

I think DVD-RW will alst longer as DVD-R is dye base and DVD-RW is melting the melt to rewrite it.

[garryheather]

With Blu-ray on the horzion, most discs should out-live the format*.

Hmmm... that's not such a good statement when you think about it, is it ?






* Figuratively speaking. The DVD formats, in particular, DVD-Video, has such a userbase now it won't go "obsolete" any time soon because of alienating the paying public. Unless they give us all new playback hardware, of course !