2026 Optical Media Durability Update

Eight years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered: Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary. Here are the subsequent annual updates: 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details. MonthMediaGoodBadVendor 01/04CD-R5x0GQ 05/04CD-R5x0Memorex 02/06CD-R5x0GQ 11/06DVD-R5x0GQ 12/06DVD-R1x0GQ 01/07DVD-R4x0GQ 04/07DVD-R3x0GQ 05/07DVD-R2x0GQ 07/11DVD-R4x0Verbatim 08/11DVD-R1x0Verbatim 05/12DVD+R2x0Verbatim 06/12DVD+R3x0Verbatim 04/13DVD+R2x0Optimum 05/13DVD+R3x0Optimum The fields in the table are as follows: Month: The date marked on the media in Sharpie, and verified via the on-disk metadata. Media: The type of media. Good: The number of media with this type and date for which all MD5…