OOps! A problem with older CD Rs

[smrgol]

My dad does volunteer work in the AV department at the local hospital.
When he was last in the department head was trying to get some data off of some five year old CDRs they had burned for the archive.

It seems that the permanant marker that they had labelled the discs with has damaged the CDs and made them unreadable.

This could potentally be a major problem for all of us who mark our CDs in this manner.

Comments

[kellic.livejournal.com]

Hmmm I don't believe that it was the market that caused the damage. A PM shouldn't damage the reflective coating on the front of the CD which is really the only way to kill a CD-R short of taking a box cutter to the back of the CD. Even scratches on the back can be fixed with the right tools.

Now I HAVE heard of cheap O CD-R's going bad after a while but its really rare.

[smrgol-t-kirin.livejournal.com]

The "reflective" layer is just under a very thin protective layer on the "label" side of the disc.

It could happen. Remember also that both markers and CD-R discs probably have been "improved" in the last five years too. The head of AV there is pretty good with computers, so if he said it's marker damage I'd be very inclined to believe him.