Back in the day my company had a regionally-slightly-popular Linux distro. Every couple months we'd burn 500-700 discs. We were small enough that it didn't make sense to mass produce, so we burned them ourselves.
We would occasionally get reports from people of being unable to read the discs, and so we went through ~6 months of investigation, test shipping to relatives, paying our customers to ship the discs back so we could check them.
Eventually I found that while every disc would validate by checksum of the entire disc (part of our burn process), if I tracked the time required to read every block, the discs that people had problems with would tend to have some spikes in the time it took to read some blocks. The drives we were using would read them, sometimes taking an amazingly long time to do so (like 30 minutes instead of 2), but users drives would just fail them.
Eventually I wrote a new validation process that in addition to the checksum used the timing information as well to determin if the disc failed, and at that point our failures in the field basically went to 0.
But, we got really sensitive to vendors of discs. Basically it was Taiyo Yuden or nothing. Some big brands would give us 20% failures to burn, where Taiyo Yuden was <1%.
I remember this being my basic rule of thumb for buying writable DVDs, though for... home usage, nothing approaching your scale.
I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own.
I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.
You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO
Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/
Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/
This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.
Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.
What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.
When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD drive conceals the error -- it interpolates for this unreadable data and doesn't tell the host. Some drives do report C2 errors, but many lie about their capabilities, or have poor implementations.
Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right now". CD drives do not do this reliably, or give reliable answers. Exact Audio Copy is looking to detect this and account for it.
EAC is best used with drives which reliably report wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a fixed amount, and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how your drive reports known discs to what's in the AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to read the same audio data multiple times over to get a good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.
See https://www.accuraterip.com/ for more details of how CD drives lie to you and let you down
It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.
That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.
Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress
This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn
AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.
[1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--burne...
(And is there a known good CLI tool for backing up copies of them?)
I have some Blu Rays I worry will be lost to disc rot 20 years from now...
[0]: https://usa.pioneer/collections/optical-drives/products/bdr-...
[1]: https://makemkv.com/
“A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.”
It sucks that firmware updates used to be a thing to look forward to but now are something to be avoided at all cost. I'd rather buy a second drive if I needed some new feature.
MakeMKV will show you all the relevant drive info when you start it up, including LibreDrive status. Here's my BDR-XS07 for example: https://i.imgur.com/10CGsbm.png
With a combination of MakeMKV, DVDfab Passkey, and a LibreDrive-supporting drive I can rip pretty much anything. Passkey is a driver-level thing like AnyDVD HD. Both of them are available perpetually-licensed but AnyDVD is currently being legaled and is unavailable: https://www.dvdfab.cn/passkey.htm
You can try MakeMKV for free using the beta key posted monthly on their subreddit, but I just went ahead and bought it because it's not that expensive and then I don't have to think about it: https://old.reddit.com/r/makemkv/comments/1jolbsq/the_may_ke...
I'm currently going through and backing up my library with Passkey's “Rip to Image”. Due to the way LibreDrive works, it's common for MakeMKV to be able to make MKVs (lol) directly from a BD/UHD disc in the drive but fail to open a protected ISO of the same title. For this reason I uncheck “Keep Protection” in Passkey for anything AACS (BD, UHD, HD-DVD (yes I have an HD-DVD drive)) so I can run the image through MakeMKV later. I do check “Keep Protection” for DVDs however, because CSS is fully broken and I want to do the most untouched rip possible.
so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.
https://rapmag.com/a/01/feb01/hhb-burnit-cdr-830-review
I guess it's time to find an old computer CD burner and see if those work.
Pioneer publish the approved media list for their drives but it's not really detailed enough since it only lists by manufacturer while the firmware is operating on manufacturer plus media code: https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved...
You can potentially get better results by patching your discs into your drive's firmware using MediaCodeSpeedEdit: https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/
https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt
> 1.1.0.8 14 Oct 2007 — added read speed patch for PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111/112/212 drives, increasing +/-R read speed from 12x to 16x, +/-DL/RW from 8x to 12x. This patch is not available for 109/110 drives because 16x/12x is a bit too fast for smooth reading on these drives.
> 1.1.0.1 01 May 2007 — added RPC1 patch for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmwares, added flasher patch allowing downgrade and 'same to same' flashing for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmware flasher
> 1.0.8.18 10 Sep 2006 — added support for PIONEER DVR-111D 1.29, DVR-111 1.29
> 1.0.8.17 18 Jul 2006 — added support for Pioneer (Buffalo) DVR-111D 8.25, DVR-111L 8.26
Oddly, the photo CDs I got professionally written were great.
I am not sure the authors spectrometer test(which was very cool, avidly reading that series of articles right now) would reveal anything as polycarbonate is naturally quite opaque to uv light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#/media/File:Visi... Note how the transmission is dramatically reduced once past violet.
Fun fact ordinary clear polycarbonate eyeglasses do just as good a job as sun glasses at protecting your eyes from uv.
I changed the original title, to express it's testing "new old stock" of DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later, as in "writing to these DVD-R and CD-R that were made a long time ago, and kept in their box".
Quoting from the article: "The Fuji did well even after all these years – it’s likely that disc is at least 25 years old. "
I think this is more informative than the original title, because there is not much interest in testing how to burn optical media (we have figured that out by how), while checking in great detail if OLD optical media can STILL be burned is very interesting!
I was captivated by the spectrometer test to check the UV protection, as I would expect that to be the #1 problem for data longevity testing.
I never heard of Falcon Tech Int'l before today. I found info about their CD-Rs/DVD-Rs here: https://falconrak.com/product/products-matrix-2/
A few years ago (before affordable cloud backup offerings) this was fairly common for Small Businesses to use, for this reason.
You'll want to ensure the malware can't destroy your backup, but that is possible too. A traditional way is to have a separate backup machine that runs backup program and pulls files remotely. Some backup apps can store directly to cloud storage and can work with "append only" permissions, to ensure that client can't delete existing backups. In this configuration, a separate trusted machine must run pruning periodically.
(Another reason is that the disks do bit rot however, and you'll never know until it's too late. Meanwhile, my ZFS fileserver sends me a email every weekend that it's scrubbed all the disks and found no errors - this warms my heart :) )
oh, btw. "Blockchains solve this" haha.
As for "encrypting your backups", that's what the "check" command is for - it can't ensure that this .py file actually contains python code (and not encrypted data with ransomware message), but it can check that indices are well-formed, and file checksums match the uploaded contents. Obviously it should also be run on trusted machine.
Not sure what this whole "blockchain" comment was about.
The blockchain I mentioned was just a reference to the fact that with hashcodes on everything make corruptions at least detectable, but yeah it wasn't clear what I meant.
There are forensic Write blockers for drives tho starting at around $200 for SATA/IDE solution.
LTO tape can be cheaper, but the cost of the drives has long been an obstacle to dabbling.
So many non-technical people think "a backup" is enough. I learned long ago to keep 20.
