When you deal with as much old crap (especially computers) as I do, you start to get a feel for “how long things last.” Some things last longer than you would think. Other things don’t last as long as you would think. For that matter I guess some things last exactly as long as you would think. Wow, those last three sentences were pointless, weren’t they? How about some examples?

The oldest media I deal with on a regular basis are 5 1/4″ floppy disks — you remember, the old, square diskettes that were, well, floppy? I have over a thousand Commodore 64 floppies that I’ve either manually transferred over to D64 disk images or have needed to access for one reason or another. For several years my own disks weren’t stored lovingly like they should have been; they spent time (years) in garages and attics, packed away and forgotten about. I’ve also picked up bundles of disks from garage sales and thrift stores, mostly just to look through them for curiosity’s sake (God knows how those were stored over the years). Surprisingly, old 5 1/4″ disks have an amazing survival rate — 90%-95%, I’d guess. I’m constantly surprised that these things still work, but they do. The back of most floppy disk jacket sleeves contained a list of don’t that warned about temperature, magnets, bending, folding, improper handling, getting them wet, holding them the wrong way, using them on a Thursday, etc. — and yet despite my best efforts to destroy them, most of these things still work.

In fact, for the most part I have a better success rate with reading 5 1/4″ disks than with the more recent 3 1/2″ disks. 3 1/2″ disks were an improvement over 5 1/4″ in almost every department: they were smaller, they had a sliding metal trap door covering the media’s film beneath (unlike 5 1/4″ disks, which had the film exposed), they held more data, and their hard plastic shell offered — in theory — protection. Despite the fact that most of my old 3 1/2″ disks were stored in similar places as my old 5 1/4″ disks (garages, mostly), I’d say the survival rate of my old 3 1/2″ disks is closer to 75%, maybe less. Last year I made one last pass through my old disk boxes, burning copies of everything to CD/DVD before tossing out the old diskettes, and I was shocked at how many disks simply no longer worked. Fortunately most of what I lost were old games that are easily re-acquired via the Internet, but still the failure rate of diskettes just a few years old was both surprising and alarming.

Then we come to CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, which last somewhere between ten-thousand years and ten minutes, depending on who you ask. I kid, but the lifespan of burned discs is still debated. What experts will tell you is that no one knows for sure how long they will really last, and how long they’ll last is probably related to the brands you buy. I can vouch for that. In 1995 (before you), I burned three CD-Rs of software. All three of those discs are now unreadable. The gold layer simply flaked off, taking the data with it. I’m not saying that all CD-Rs will only last fifteen years; I’m only saying, those did. (I suspect as time went on, CD-Rs were made from better materials). As far as DVD-Rs go, I’ve seen the same. I have several disks 5-7 years old that no longer work, and lots more that do. It’s hard to put a failure rate on them because again I suspect different manufacturers, drive models and burning software all may contribute to different failure rates, but in general I don’t think these things will last forever.

Then you’ve got hard drives. Hard drives that get used at least once every six months seem to last a long time. Old hard drives that I stored away years ago and were marked “Working” suddenly no longer work. I had a lot of old hard drives — like, maybe a hundred or so — and for the most part I found that the ones measured in gigabytes usually (usually) worked while the ones measured in megabytes didn’t. Your mileage will vary, of course. I found several 10, 20 and 30 gig drives that still worked. I found very few of my old 200, 300 and 500 meg drives did.

It’s been years since I viewed a VCR tape or listened to an audio cassette for anything other than digitizing them, but for what it’s worth, those things seem to last forever. The only audio tapes I found with issues were the ones I’d stored on my dash, years ago. I read once that VCR tapes have a shelf life of about ten years; I had no problem archiving home movies from 30 years ago. Shrug. The only real problem I had with either of them was occasionally the tapes would snap when my over zealous VCR would rewind them, an annoying but not insurmountable issue.

The final category, and the incident that spawned the idea for this post, is audio CDs — not CDs I’ve burned, but CDs I’ve bought. I’m still working my way through ripping all of my CDs to MP3s, and over the past few days I’ve found several that my computer simply won’t read. None of them are scratched — in fact, the number of CDs that to the naked eye look like I may have stored them between pieces of sand paper is alarmingly high, and my computer had no problem reading them at all. And yet just this week I’ve had five that my computer won’t read at all. Almost all of them I can live without (Big Head Todd and the Monsters? When did I buy that?) but it’s still interesting. I need to try them on another machine and see if I have better luck elsewhere. To the naked eye they look fine but for whatever reason, the drive rejects them. Maybe the drive just doesn’t like Big Head Todd.