/vr/ can you redpill me can carts/disc actually go bad just

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they cant go soon enuff in tha trash

Disks will die long before carts do. Both won't last forever but carts will last way longer.

They won't last forever in a "nothing will last forever" type of way.

Discs are a little more susceptible if they you treat them like a child treats his or her toys - IE LIKE LITERAL SHIT*.
But storing discs in even half-adequate conditions - like not leaving them stacked on top of one another, kept in cases if in a humid environment, away from outside, oil grease and so on - should keep them workable for long after you and I are gone and some poor schmuck in the future is paying $500.00 per disc for our shitty Madden games.

Granted, some discs are fucked now, but that's because they have been treated like shit.

*my little cousins, 8 years old, has PS3 discs all over the floor, stacked on top of one another, smears greasy fingerprints all over them, drops them on tiled floors and other assorted horrors. It makes me wonder if I was as bad to my SNES carts growing up - likely not because even if I threw out the boxes (didn't give a shit back then - still don't lol) I kept those carts together, safe, and usually in dust shields.

Don't buy into bit rot.
If you store things appropriately they will last longer. This is true of anything.
Store things in wet and or close environments and it is more likely to be damaged.
Atari carts dumped in the desert for decades. Dug up. Most work after minor repair or cleaning.
Bit rot is a lie. Here's here someone posts a picture of a Sega CD or Saturn game with holes in it. Probably kept inside a CD book, in the basement, for 20yrs....

>>3758171
'Bit rot' is a meme that exaggerates the truth. Your carts will be good for a long time yet. CDs will probably fail sooner.

The only place where you really need to worry about quality degradation over time is when you're dealing with 'lossy' formats like JPEG or MP3 on an active hard drive.

>>3758305
>JPEG or MP3 on an active hard drive.
say you deal actively with jpegs - what would be a good way to prevent loss in those files over time?

I ask because I'm curious because my job is in digital archiving and the standard procedure is to digitize old documents into JPEG in order to make them a smaller file size to download for the general public. However I never use JPEG personally (always PNG or TIFF for important images). It's something I've been thinking about recently because even if these files will likely be good for some time perhaps a decade from now some guy after me is going to notice GBs worth of shitty files.

For a few years at the beginning of CDs, some second rate disc pressing facilities did have less than sterile conditions which led to a small percentage of discs getting impurities embedded in them which over time broke down into corrosive enough substances to render them unreadable. It seems as far as games go that Sega CDs are the biggest offenders.

>>3758308
To be honest I don't know much about how to stop the accumulation of JPEG artifacts. I believe there are different image file formats which are lossless but take up a lot more space, like the ones you mention. Maybe you should tell your clients that they can expect a decline in quality after X date, and offer a discount on a re-scan of everything at that time, or else offer the option to put them up in a lossless format? DESU most people won't care about it.