Question light and UV and cardboard box

[gamer87]

Does the cardboard material used in boxes protect from light and UV? I keep objects sensitive to light and UV inside these boxes example: DVD discs and plastics 

 

 

Edited March 2, 2021 by gamer87

[swansont]

Yes, that should protect from UV. 

[studiot]

Mechanically produced CDs and DVDs are unaffected by normal levels of sunlight.

Ones you 'write' yourself (recordable and re-recordable) work on a different (chemical) principle which is light sensitive.
Some brands are worse than others.
So for these yes light protection is necessary.
Cardboard is better than paper  - the thicker the better.

[gamer87]

27 minutes ago, studiot said:

Mechanically produced CDs and DVDs are unaffected by normal levels of sunlight.

Ones you 'write' yourself (recordable and re-recordable) work on a different (chemical) principle which is light sensitive.
Some brands are worse than others.
So for these yes light protection is necessary.
Cardboard is better than paper  - the thicker the better.

my DVD discs are recordable or virgin and I had this doubt if the cardboard protects or the light and UV penetrates through the cardboard

[studiot]

20 minutes ago, gamer87 said:

my DVD discs are recordable or virgin and I had this doubt if the cardboard protects or the light and UV penetrates through the cardboard

Well it does penetrate a bit every time you take the lid off so keep them in smaller boxes so each one gets exposured less often.
I see you have some shoe boxes.
Theya re good since some are double walled.

[gamer87]

all the boxes are kept closed I have the same boxes as in the pictures but I have doubts if it is protected from light and UV because I saw this:

[swansont]

UV isn't shown there, probably because it does not penetrate paper unless it's very thin. x-rays and gammas are generally much higher energy than the UV we're typically exposed to.

[Toby Jug]

Hi.

Looks like you've had plenty of good advice.  UV is not that different from visible light, so unless your cardboard is not like most cardboard (a conventional mesh of cellulose fibres) you'll be fine.

However, the bigger problem may be heat build up.  The light-coloured and glossy boxes you have in your photos are the safer ones, these will reflect most of the light.  The black and matt finish cardboard boxes will just absorb the light (including UV) and get both the box and it's contents hot.  Plastic DVD's and CD's warp in the heat and this will be a bigger problem than anything else.  Don't put your dark boxes directly in the window and keep the room at normal temperature and you'll be fine.  In my limited experience DVD's will soften enough at about 40'C that they will be unuseable after a few days unless you're also very careful about how you stacked them to keep the presure over their surface as uniform as possible.

Before discussing any more possibilities you should be aware that recordable DVD's and CD's were never meant to last forever.  You must make back-up's of important data and do this on regular basis (maybe get the DVD's out and make fresh copies every couple of years).  Nothing you do is going to stop all e-m radiation and chemical reactions from taking place, so eventually the data stroage media will degrade.  Even if you put the DVD's in a perfectly insulated, lead-lined vaccum chamber you still can't prevent other risks like your house catching fire and all the data being lost.

I've just seen the last post you made.  This looks like a description of the penetration power of various different forms of radiation.  Yes, some forms of radiation will get through your cardboard box, like gamma rays and neutrinos.  Forrtunately, most of these will also go straight through your DVDs without changing them in any way.  However, it re-inforces the earlier point.  The only way to keep your data totally secure is to make back-ups AND preferably keep that data somewhere else (another house or stored "in the cloud" etc.)

SUMMARY:  Your boxes are OK.  The light-coloured reflective ones are better.  Keep them out of direct sunlight and keep them cool.  Backup your data frequently and keep the backup elsewhere for maximum security.

 

[Sensei]

If you are concerned about the safety of data storage after years, you should answer the question of whether you are able to load data from a tape recorded in the 80's or 90's...

In my laptop there is no built-in CD/DVD reader at all.. (in my PC I don't have it either plugged all the time) Do you have it in your laptop? It increases weight of the device therefore it is used less and less.. Do you have external CD/DVD reader/writer? Soon it will be hard to get them at all. Like tapes. Or similar things from the past years.

Edited March 2, 2021 by Sensei

[gamer87]

The DVD I own is MDisc and conventional DVD, I keep them inside a black box and the box inside the cardboard box my doubt now is the black casebox will heat the DVD discs reducing their durability? will the black cardboard box also heat up the disks that are inside it? all of them are in my closet the cardboard box on top of the closet and the black box and shoe inside the closet

 

this image that I posted the rays cross penetrate the cardboard these rays is UV?

Edited March 2, 2021 by gamer87

[Sensei]

10 minutes ago, gamer87 said:

The DVD I own is MDisc and conventional DVD, I keep them inside a black box and the box inside the cardboard box my doubt now is the black casebox will heat the DVD discs reducing their durability? will the black cardboard box also heat up the disks that are inside it? all of them are in my closet the cardboard box on top of the closet and the black box and shoe inside the closet

 

this image that I posted the rays cross penetrate the cardboard these rays is UV?

Repeat the question after 10, 15 or 20 years when there will be no working CD/DVD reader/writer anymore. Who cares about UV light? Write 10+ copies of the same files with checksums every 1 kb or so. If you will have in 2030-2040 working reader which will work with PC you will be able to recover data from 10 copies.. but most likely your readers will be broken and modern in 2030-2040 PC won't allow plugging ancient CD/DVD readers anymore..

[gamer87]

I keep them inside a black box and the box inside the cardboard box my doubt now is the black casebox will heat the DVD discs reducing their durability? will the black cardboard box also heat up the disks that are inside it? all of them are in my closet the cardboard box on top of the closet and the black box and shoe inside the closet

 

this image that I posted the rays cross penetrate the cardboard these rays is UV?

[Toby Jug]

51 minutes ago, gamer87 said:

this image that I posted the rays cross penetrate the cardboard these rays is UV?

No, not quite.

 

Raios Gamma  = Gamma Rays.         Raios X  =  X rays.

  Both of these are electro-magnetic radiations with much higher energies than visibile light.  UV is much more like visible light.

[gamer87]

do the cardboard boxes shown block or not block UV and light?

[MigL]

I wouldn't worry much about DVDs being damaged by light/UV.
Some of mine are 30 years old, are not stored in boxes, and have outlasted predicted expectation.
Most people have switched to online storage for their content now.

You should worry more about hammering 🙄 .
( if that hammer slips, goodbye DVD )

 

 

Edited March 2, 2021 by MigL

[Toby Jug]

Nothing blocks UV completely.  100 kilometers of lead wouldn't do it but it would cut the proportion of UV passing through to such a small amount that we would say it had been completely stopped.

It's difficult to find actual data to show the proportion of UV blocked by cardboard but there is general concensus that only the highest energies UV-C are likely to penetrate to any significant amount.  Are your DVD's in a plastic case and is that case actually a polycarbonate?  We have a lot more data about the performance of polycarbonate and other plastics against UV.  The Kodak company were the experts in protecting sensitive materials from e-m radiation a few years ago and they used to wrap their ordinary film and also their x-ray film in a special type of paper* and put it in a carboard box.   Wrap your boxes with some siver foil (aluminium foil) if you're really worried because the cardboard and silver foil really will keep out almost all the UV.

Are you really interested in protecting your DVD's?  There are similar posts all over other forums with the same pictures and the name Gamer87.  Are you trying to boost the ranking of some website in the google search engine or something?

* Late editing:  The paper wasn't even that "special", it was just paper.  It's just that their biggest problem was some contamination in that paper.  Most paper mills produced paper with trace amounts of radioactive elements and that would obviously damage the film.

Edited March 2, 2021 by Toby Jug
Accuracy

[studiot]

I feel sure that we have discussed DVD radiation protection before in other threads.

@gamer87

I hope you will not take this the wrong way since you are right to worry about your DVD's

When someone's post count gets to a certain level here, they are often 'awarded' a special category.

So I nominate you for the special category of 'superworrier'.

55 minutes ago, MigL said:

I wouldn't worry much about DVDs being damaged by light/UV.

I used to be associated with an avant garde video production company that lost whole boxes of recordable DVD archives due to ageing.

It can and does happen, and as iI noted some brands of media are better/worse than others.

The watchphrase in the digital world is, as always, "it's backup, backup, backup darling."

Two weeks ago I did just that with a DVD data archive disk dated 2005.
I could hear the drive reading and re-reading and struggling to read the disk so I made a copy.
You can tell when a disk is beginning to fail as it takes longer and longer to access and you can hear the multiple attempts to read.

Did you know that
The system contains a subroutine to read the disk several times until it obtains consistent data?
This is also true of hard drives

[gamer87]

i don't have aluminum to wrap the cardboard box i don't know the type of UV that penetrates the cardboard but would you recommend that i keep or throw the cardboard in the trash?

[StringJunky]

This is the Canadian Conservation Institute's take on it: 

https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html

Edited March 2, 2021 by StringJunky

[StringJunky]

Verbatim UltraLife 4.7GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R claim 100 year life.

[John Cuthber]

21 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Verbatim UltraLife 4.7GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R claim 100 year life.

How do they know?

😉

[studiot]

28 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Verbatim UltraLife 4.7GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R claim 100 year life.

 

6 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

How do they know?

😉

Good question +1

 

I haven't seen these but I do have some original Philips gold archival recordable CDs going strong.
I bought these in the early 1990s

[StringJunky]

18 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

How do they know?

😉

Accelerated aging tests. I know what you are going to say next. No they don't have a Tardis. Material degradation is a function of exposure to the source. So, if you double the intensity you halve the time to reach the same state of degradation. I learnt this from reading about film and photo paper stability when silver photography was the norm.

Edited March 3, 2021 by StringJunky

[studiot]

17 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Accelerated aging tests. I know what you are going to say next. No they don't have a Tardis. Material degradation is a function of exposure to the source. So, if you double the intensity you halve the time to reach the same state of degradation. I learnt this from reading about film and photo paper stability when silver photography was the norm.

That might be a good measure for a single ageing process

I remember seeing a Building Research project that had been going on for about 30 years where they were testing drainpipes by constantly trickling dilute vinegar over them.

But it has already been noted here that there are multiple ageing processes in CDs.

One of which is not susceptible to such a speed up technique.

This is what partly killed a good friend of mine at University.

That is all plastics are subject to creep.

Edited March 3, 2021 by studiot

[gamer87]

I was confused because some people where I live said that UV and light penetrated the cardboard but you say that then I don't trust you who are experts