Verbatim CD-RW, my experiences 10-15 years later?

[LightWorker01]

So this is a story of a gem find of golden wedding photos on a forgotten, badly stored, severely damaged disk, and is why I love verbatim as a manufacturer. So a bit of backstory:

So I have been into IT, photos, video and all of that since the age of about 6. By the age of 8, I actively sought using online information the best quality CD-Media I could find, and mostly settled on verbatim, though also used some other disks that I will be later be discussing. I mostly use Verbatim (genuine AZO disks) for crucial stuff, and Ritek F16 type disks (fuji dye) for day to day stuff, got loads of them at a boot sale for £2. Those have been quite good, and some I wrote many years back actually give no errors, years later.

I also keep important stuff backed up on multiple disk sets Verbatim AZO, M-Disc, and TayoYuden disks (to be given out to various family members, as I have archived family history from 1960 - present day in formats viewable on normal DVD-Players.

I used to use VERBATIM CD-RW for regular changing backups a few years back, rotating a disk set, until I later gave them up for hard drive and DVD-R / blu-ray backups. Most were well stored in CD wallets.

Now I was aware of the archival difficulties of phase-change media, but I also suspected that it may actually be quite stable. I have some RW disks from 2006 that do not give any uncorrectable errors, and some TDK media from 2006 that is all good. As an 8 year old, I would insist on my pocket money being spent on good quality disks.

One such disk of mine (VERBATIM CD-RW), was very BADLY stored. I would never mistreat my disks like this generally and all other family memories/mediums have been carefully stored by me, from super-8 reels to digital archives.

It was erased/reused a few times over the course of a year in 2009 / 2010 for regular backups, including of my mothers phone (you know, the ones where you HAD to install the software and manually download them). I later switched to hard drive backup when I moved out at 16 in 2011. But my mums phone was not backed up again apart from on THIS disc, and was forgotten about.

This disk was stored in a garage with a leaky roof and was subjected to water drops/humidity/temperature variations. It was later dried and filed in a box, then went into my loft. Still with its hand-written ink label. It was forgotten. I carefully had everything archived. Every video tape / DVD and all that on redundant backups. But some pictures were labelled as missing. Including my stepdad's parents and my younger sisters grandparents golden wedding pictures, that were taken on my mother's samsung flip phone at the time.

Both of them are deceased, along with my mother. Tonight I found the disk in the attic and opted to for a laugh to see if I could read it.

With a couple of small holes in the reflective layer where the data is written and a large amount of it peeled off in an unwritten area of the disk, this seemed a hopeless task. But alas, no. It read! I ripped it with alcohol 120% and opted to fast-skip error blocks (of which there were many)!

95% of the data was not only readable, it was uncorrupted. A couple of video files were trash, as were a few photos and text messages, but everything else was fine. Much of the stuff was already in my archive.

A folder 'mums phone backup' stood out, and I was stunned to see everything from my now-deceased mothers point of view from a phone from 2007 - 2009. We had plenty of other footage and pics, but her phone I only backed up once before leaving and we forgot about it.

Including these beautiful images I attached here of my mother with my sisters grandparents, and my stepdad with them as well as well as my sister. On their GOLDEN WEDDING DAY, 48 hours before the grandad died peacefully from cancer. He had insisted he would be alive for his golden wedding, and would let go just after. true to his word.

This is a testament to how well genuine verbatim disks are made, and a lovely find, to add those beautiful photos to my archive, and to suprise my stepdad with some printed photos. See attached a couple of them.

No matter what the disk is, do not discard it from your archive folks as this one was, but keep it. You never know what you may miss.

I hope to put up some detailed test results as to how various brands from my childhood performed 10 - 15 years later. Most were stored at room temperature at a stable 20 - 22C in CD-Wallets in a memories briefcase.

But enjoy this find for what it is, and marvel at how a disk was readable with so much damage. I could not attempt to clean with fluid due to the damage to the lacquer coating on top and missing pieces may damage more (DVD did not have this issue, but CDs tended to have the reflective layer close to the top) so I had to dry wipe as best I could before reading. It was covered in dust and grime from being in a dirty garage and attic for years with no protection at all.

Go verbatim!

EDIT: See nero discspeed scandisc image attached. You will see exactly how basic error correction was a god-send for this particular disk, with many, many correctable errors. Note the severely peeled off part of the reflective layer was just outside the written area of the disk, but with some sizeable pinholes in the written area.

So this was 9 years of being stored in the worst possible environments, without a jewel case, in wet, damp conditions, then the temperature variations of an attic. Not too bad I would say, especially for an RW disk that had been erased and re-used many times as I had a set of 3 that I rotated weekly at the time but it's final use was the phone photos, though this was genuine verbatim media.

A slightly off topic, is also attached, a scan today from a Sony camcorder DVD-RW recorded 1 year later, stored in my CD-Wallet after a year of being with someone else in unknown storage kept loose in a drawer then added to my CD wallet when it fell into my possession of a canal trip me and my mother and family friend went on, and viewed a few times and was added to the archive later. RW disks for me have held up very well in general, though virtually all important stuff did not go on RW disks.