We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
Where the hell was this disk kept? Last time I saw one like this it was an AOL Starter Disc I found during spring cleanup a couple years ago. God knows how many freeze and thaw cycles that thing had gone through but it was version 5.0 so we're talking at least 20 years outside.
That thing was used as a drink coaster
seriously though, if your discs look like this, you're doing an extremely poor job looking after them
you can also, like, keep them in a humidity-free environment and, you know, back them up. Which you can't do with call-home, DRM'd download-only digital copies.
I recently tried to read a small number of 30+ year-old floppy disks containing code I wrote for the Atari ST and they're all unreadable. The disk surface is noticably degraded.
A mix of buying cheap disks, using non-standard formats to prioritise space over reliability, and waiting too long to duplicate the data.
Lesson learned.
Yeah no shit, nothing lasts forever. Doesn't stop me from preserving everything as best as I can tho.
Greentext is reductive, but at the same time DVDs and optical media in general are a paradox. In theory, they will last forever, but at the same time there are so many ways to fuck up with them that they're basically only good as like a plan Z storage for really important files that you wrap in cardboard and leave in the closet.
You said you didn’t make a copy of ISO?
All my disks are imaged and the images are all I ever interact with. I only keep the physical disks as extra backups now. Gave up on the idea of "collecting" after facing the reality that packaging starts to disintegrate after a couple of decades, not to mention disk rot.
I've dd copied all my playstation 2 disks to a NAS, because they were getting old. Running those games on the ps2 off an external disk is a lot more effort than just putting the disc in though, so they are still my main goto
On the bright side, that would make it accessible by emulators, allowing you and whoever you give access to it, to play it from anywhere. Even with an android
aye same thing happened to my car i supposedly would be able to own forever. I left it out in the yard for ten years and now it looks like something bonnie and clyde got shot to death in.
You own the game forever so do protect it yourself.
Looks like a recordable disc that has gone bad. Pressed CDs, DVDs and BDs should last a pretty long while.