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Originally Posted by Tarana
The degradation typically only occurs with stuff YOU recorded, not the commercial DVDs (unless they are those compact ones with multiple movies on them). I've moved to getting all my favorites onto hard drives and backing up those hard drives. The real drive for that is that both my Mom and brother now have neurological problems with their hands and that they are afraid they will drop and break the disks. Now they play everything via Plex. Only the Disney movies (Beauty & the Beast, Lion King) are on DVD/BlueRay that I can't transfer to HD.
Family photos are probably the most important things to backup and keep putting on new media because they will be gone forever otherwise. Can't rely on clouds as they often have been discontinued without warning (or when you are in the middle of a family crisis and can't deal with it).
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Yes indeed, and same can be said about the CDs that predated the DVDs. I remember having a lot of failed CD writes with Windows PCs. It was frustrating to create a CD then realize it was totally unreadable. Same for the DVDs later on. I don't think I have any commercial CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs that went bad, just the ones I tried to write to.But eventually even they will go bad too. I long since moved all my data to multiple HDD backups. But even they will eventually fail or become obsolete at some point as technology progresses along.
Back in the early 1990s when I worked for Computer Associates we would create CD discs of our software suites for beta testing purposes. The tech was still fairly new, and even our CD experts said they threw away more CDs than they shipped out to beta testers! That was still the DOS era though as we had not moved our suites over to Windows yet due to customer concerns. But at least the CDs were more stable than those 3.5" floppy disks which really were not floppy but harder plastic. Those had a shelf life of about -1 day!
You always had to make multiple backups of those as they would go bad very quickly and very easily. We got them by the truck load, and a small percentage would be bad right out of the box. We have come a long way since then...