I recently learned of MDisc (there’s a CD and DVD version, too, iirc) and decided to get a burner and convert my old data CDs.

While I haven’t verified every single bit, I did check that the files copied off of it were still functional and didn’t see any issues. Also didn’t get any errors. I was surprised because I’ve had some of them for over 20 years now and didn’t do more than put them in CD binders to protect them (during the days when I didn’t even consider the longevity of the media, other then obvious things like scratches.

Only disc I wasn’t able to get the data from was a packet CD, which was a special format that facilitated treating the disc more like diskettes, where you could read or write at will via the filesystem rather than writing the disc as a special package from the start (or having multiple sessions if there’s still room on the disc after one such write). I was able to find references to the tech, though not if it was a standard or just a name a few different companies used for different implementations, but I wasn’t able to find Linux drivers that could do anything other than rip the ISO and a few strings or tell me it can’t find anything. Though it’s possible that corruption is really what happened here because I’d expect RW CDs to last a shorter time than the write once ones.

Though I suppose I could try it on my old windows machine and see if drivers are more readily available there.