Working in the pastics industry for many years I find the claims of the discs lasting for 50 or 100 years laughable. The same thing happened with plastics designed for outside use until after 3 years in the sunlight the UV breakdown was turning plastics into brittle garbage along with color fading. After adding ultraviolet absorbers they now claim 20 years (plastic siding). Plastics indoors usually don't have to worry about UV but what about little teeny-wheeeeny
holes and checks and cracks which occur after many years of sitting around.
Every time the laser hits the inside it creates heat which tends to cure the plastic and distort its properties. I will give them 5 years and then lets see what they play like. Five years from now we will be in the 8th generation of new discs which probably will be totally incompatible with today's discs so I am not to worried about longevity as we will have to transfer all of the stuff from today's discs to tomorrows discs anyway.

JJK

I've got Data CD's that around around 4/5 years old. The only problem i've had is with scratches. I plan on transfering some of my old CD's to new ones, kjust in case.

With DVD's though, it's not sure how long they will last. They haven't been out long enough to know.

I've been looking for an answer to this for eight years. I have read many of the scholarly papers created by Kodak (now out of the media business) and others. I have learned three things:

1. There have been manufacturing defects and dye formulation problems that did indeed cause some media to fail prematurely. The best known defect was the glue problem with laserdiscs (a related technology) which resulted in "laser rot." I have seen this problem myself and know firsthand that it exists.

2. The aging of the media is directly related to storage conditions. This is true of any media. I have done restorations of Kodachrome shot in 1942 which was stored in ideal conditions, and the colors are excellent. By contrast, I just recently scanned several hundred photos from an estate that was in an un-airconditioned home in Los Angeles. Many of these photos were less than ten years old, and they were completely faded from the heat and smog.

CD and DVD media should be stored in a completely dark room, at moderately low humidity, and at a very cool temperature. As one of the other posters pointed out, plastic doesn't do well in sunlight and heat.

3. Media makes a difference. There are many dye formulations out there, and they will all age differently. However, this is where I get frustrated. I have still yet to be able to find the results from any idependent source that has tested the various dyes, using accelerated aging tests (which of course only approximate aging, but which nonetheless is probably a reasonable predictor of longevitiy). I do know, however, that especially with DVDs, some media just won't play on certain players, and others will. This in turn is probably an indication of the different reflective properties of the media.

The only suggestion at this point is that you use the best possible media for critical work, and that you store it carefully. For CD-R, the Mitsui (their most expensive brand) is generally acclaimed to be the most stable. For DVD-R, I haven't yet seen such claims, but several independent tests have shown the Maxell 2X branded media to be the most compatible, and for the time being I am using this as a proxy for quality in general, and therefore stability over time.

One final note. CD-R has been around for about eight years. I would guess that there are now billions of discs out there. If they were going to fail in just a few years, as has been suggested, this would be all over the Internet, the broadcast media, etc. I have specifically looked for such stories and haven't found them, so I think that it is safe to say that, properly stored, CD-R and DVD-R (and DVD+R) media are likely to last longer than you or I (but I'm over 50, so that may not be so long ...).

Another thing that is kind of related to this is paper labels. When I fist got my Cd burner many years ago I burned tons of music Cd's (I was a DJ) I put paper labels on all of them. Now most of the paper labels have started to peel off making all the Cd's pretty much useless. So even thought the Cd is fine, it is still useless becasue of the bad paper label.

Ritek makes the claim that their special deep-purple dye used for their G04 DVD-R blanks is very stable. I have seen statements that it is stable for "at least 100 years." There must be trade shows for DVD/CD blank manufacturers; I would assume one could get the answers quickly there.

This could cause a stability problem for DVDs. I would recommend putting labels on DVDs either.