Can't get BD-R discs to last

[gbohn]

Hi;

For the last two years I've been trying to archive my large (26 GB) Home movie DV data files. I've made over 30 burns to (mostly 25 GB) Verbatim BD-R media.

The problem is, almost all of them seem to 'go bad' within about a year of burning them. I'm getting pretty discouraged, and can't seem to figure out what's going wrong.

I started out about 2 years ago with an LG GGW-H20L and CyberLink Power2Go/Nero. All were 'verified' when they were written.

About a year later I ran Nero Discspeed on them, and many were all 'green' except for the outside 5-10% which had unrecoverable errors.

At that time, I remade the discs when I had added a new Pioneer BDR-205. This time I checked to ensure I created them with Verify and Defect Management on. I verified them with DiscSpeed and most were 100% 'Green' at that time.

But a year later and now many of these verify the first 90-95 percent as 'all green', but have yellow/red bad spots on the 'outside' scan again (and won't read completely without errors).

The discs get stored in white sleeve DVD cases in an dark environment that runs 55F - 70F. Much older DVDs I have seem fine.

Anyone have any ideas on what might be going wrong?

Thanks;

 -Greg

[chef]

Optical media does worn out over the time.
The chemicals used within them never stops “working”…

Consider backing the content up also to another target, eg. external hdd.

[gbohn]

I guess you’re saying this is par for the course with BD-R :(.

Since my Verbatim DVD-R’s seem to be lasting much longer than 1 year I expected the BD-R media to last as well.

I guess I had excessive expectations…

> Consider backing the content up also to another target, eg. external hdd.

That’s the main reason I didn’t lose the data (I had made a backup to both BD-R and external HDD so I always had a redundant backup).

So far, only the external HDD’s have held up (although one of those (out of about 10) did die on me as well over the last 2 years…).

Thanks;

  -Greg