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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Do optical disks degrade if protected from the elements? A stack of Blu-ray disks could store quite a bit.
The commonly used optical disk technologies degrade over time. CD-RW more rapidly than CDR. It's even worse for higher-density media.
And for bigger data sets, the capacity isn't there. And writable media is getting more rare. Probably because of the same reason.
Depends on the disk technologies.
CDs are prone to flaking, otherwise most disk are suspectible of oxidation (disk rot) if stored improperly. M-Disk is a long-life variant of both DVDs and Blu-Rays, although more expensive. However, write-once disks are very ransomware-resilient, and I recommend to add a write-once media to any proper backup setup.