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[Wagram]

I've yet to come across this issue and I have really, really old CD's. Not saying it doesn't exist, but i'm not that concerned about it either.

 

[westman]

The game still plays fine. Hopefully someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but my understanding is that for a lot of these early CD-based games most of the data is actually taken up by the music so you're more likely to come across some kind of sound glitch than a game-breaking problem?

That could be a factor, but data is also stored using error correcting codes that can actually compensate perfectly for localized defects as long as they are small and infrequent enough. The scheme is designed to give some tolerance against minor scratches, but should work against spot-like defects as well, since they would be equivalent to a very short scratch. Too many of them, and you would be out of luck, though, since the redundant data needed for recovery could be damaged as well.

 

[goldenpp72]

Scary.

Time to start considering moving to digital to me. I don't have old systems anymore: I sold everything to buy other stuff, including other consoles. I regret selling all those games I used to enjoy but the threads like this make me think that maybe I made the right decision.

You'll be dead before this is likely a significant issue, this is an issue of preservation.

 

[aesupreme1]

I think disc rot may be something that occurs more depending on the conditions you live in (i.e. climate, temperature, mold conditions within households,etc).

I own over 1000 CD's, almost 1000 Blu-rays/DVDs/HD-DVDs, and close to 600 disc based games.

Not a single instance of disc rot.

 

[Pingoreous]

I only collect Cartridge base games. 3DS, Vita, N64 and soon the Switch. I have nostalgia for Cartridge base games since i started playing games on the NES.

 

[sechsterangriff]

Disc rot is most likely to occur if there's humidity in the air. There's a reason why dryboxes are a thing. If you live in an area with humid weather and your house isn't very well insulated I would double check my games if I were you.
Even if there's no damage on the disks themselves check the stapples on manuals. If there are traces of rust then it's a matter of time until disc rot occurs.

 

[MoxManiac]

I remember when this article came out. I immediately checked all my Dreamcast games (have 30-40 i think), and a bunch of ps1 games. Never found an example of disc rot, thankfully.

 

[Willy Wanka]

I check the older CD-based games in my collection for signs of this but thankfully I've yet to find any. While it is something to keep an eye on and be wary of, it certainly isn't a contributing reason to go all-digital on modern consoles.

 

[Spieler Eins]

So far I've experienced more hacks than disc rot (i.e. none), but I should definitely stop being lazy at some point and back the games up...

 

[Zafir]

Maybe climate has something to do with it too. We have fairly mild winters and summers in the UK so house temperatures don't have much variation and I have never seen disc rot.

Yeah, ditto. I've got 20year old odd disks and have never experienced it in the UK.

Mind you a lot of games are backed up. It wasn't that long ago I backed up all of my PS2 games. I already had some ripped for the emulator, but I decided I might as well just do them all.

 

[ReBurn]

I've experienced disc rot and I've replaced things because of it. It's one of the things where it's easy to be smug about how you've never experienced it or it doesn't happen or you somehow take better care of your things than other people until it happens to one of your discs. Then you understand.

Discs you own probably aren't going to last forever. Some of them will deteriorate at some point.

 

[Cheerilee]

I really, really want to back up my DC, GC and Wii discs :/ I keeps pushing it because there's no easy way to do it (I'd buy a PC reader that can read those, but not second hand at $200+)


RAID IS NOT SAFE, and not a backup method. Especially not the common versions at home, but ultimately any one.

I've discussed with a friend that handle a lot of raid arrays, the simultaneous failures of discs in most devices is really, really high.

If you value your data, store it on at least three discs, in different locations (thefts, fire), some of them not plugged, and run crc checks on a regular basis.

If you use the data often, raid is handy, but that's far from safe.

Beyond duplicate copies and CRC checks, people could also be using repair data.

If you zip your files with WinRAR, you might save 10% of the filesize, but data corruption could prevent it from unzipping. Which is why you go into the "advanced settings" and set the "recovery record" at something like 10%. You basically make the RAR 10% bigger (offset by the fact that you made the file 10% smaller by zipping it). Now you can essentially lose 10% of the file to data corruption (which is a huge amount), and WinRAR will still unzip a digitally perfect file when you ask for it. So now if you occasionally do a CRC check on the integrity of your RAR files and see that one is damaged, you can repair the damage (by unzipping/rezipping with a fresh recovery record) with zero loss to your digitally-perfect data.

There are also Parchive parity files. If you have, for example, 10 ISOs that you want to protect, you can create a PAR file, which is an 11th file of approximate size to the previous 10, created by comparing those 10 files to each other. If one file is damaged, or even if all of the files have a small scattering of damage (even the PAR file), the existence of the PAR file means that everything can be repaired to digital perfection with the click of a button. One PAR file means that anything can be repaired, up to and including the complete and total destruction of one of those ISO files. The PAR files can also repair themselves, so it's a bit more convenient than unzipping/rezipping with WinRAR. You just use the PAR program to run the CRC check, and if damage is discovered, it's one click to simply "undo damage" and restore everything.

 

[televator]

Older cartridges like NES, SNES or Gameboy games have batteries that save the game (though those are replaceable, but you lose your save).

Not necessarily... There are ways to dump saves and you can keep the game powered on while changing the battery. I don't recommend the latter method, but it works.

 

[aesupreme1]

I've experienced disc rot and I've replaced things because of it. It's one of the things where it's easy to be smug about how you've never experienced it or it doesn't happen or you somehow take better care of your things than other people until it happens to one of your discs. Then you understand.

Discs you own probably aren't going to last forever. Some of them will deteriorate at some point.

Hard drives don't last forever either. In fact more often then not, computers and hard drives become obsolete quicker than disc based content do. Hard drives fail, get corrupted, and computers just stop working the way they are intended. Digital data is far more susceptible to failure then disc based content is unless you don't take care of your discs, and/or live in an area not conducive to long shelf life for discs.

 

[calc84maniac]

The exception to this, however, are Vita game cards, which are actually made of NAND flash rather than Mask-ROM, so if they're not powered on at least once every decades or so, they'll eventually lose they're data.

I have never heard such a thing about NAND flash, so please enlighten me.

 

[SURGEdude]

It certainly happens. However I've found it to be very very rare. Now Laserdiscs on the other hand, those have many issues.

 

[s_mirage]

Are there any environmental conditions that contribute to this? I haven't seen a single instance of this and I have many of the first CD-Rom games on PC. I have even a lot of those old ass demo disks from PCGamer from ages ago and none exhibit rot.

High temperatures and humidity probably don't help, and something is definitely going on when individuals have large numbers of discs go bad. A fungus that can eat the lacquer maybe?