From reading the other comments it seems all discs are like this?
In that case your problem is the calibration of your input and display device.
You can get calibration discs that will let you adjust levels in a guided way.
Or just adjust the green amount.
Disc rot is exceedingly rare. Maybe you will find one or two in a box of a thousand perhaps.
What is very likely is they never finalised the discs. They will/may be able to be finalised in a dvd recorder.
Without finalisation there is no valid filesystem thus they appear blank.
When I get home I'll give this a go, I usually use RW discs in my recorder, which ensures I dont need to finalise.
2 years is long term?
Wow now I feel old, at my age 2 years feels like what 6 months used to be lol.
Amazon Glacier Deep Archive
They're the kind that are so clear you actually see the verbatim logo on the readable side
Those are the silver reflective layer ones. They use silver because of it's better archival life vs aluminium, I have many pressed CD's that also use silver and the rest is to see how much light shines through.
Very scratchy topside, which is basically ALL white besides a tiny verbatim and dvd-r logo on the middle, somehow feels heavier.
Printable disc. That's a different item code for sure, not the same discs you used earlier. You say it had the same packaging? What logos were on it? Was the "AZO" logo on it?
You said the printable surface was "scratchy" well that's not normal it's supposed to be smooth.
I just keep the DVDs and Blu-ray as they are considering I use optical media for archives anyway!
But let's say I have a dvd that needs backup because it's extremely rare or, and this is actually more likely and what I actually do: I'm off on holiday at the end of the week and want to have Red Dwarf series 1 and I don't fancy bringing the dvd itself along because I'm short on space when packing.
Well, rip the disc to an ISO file or as a mirrored directory structure. It's only a maximum of 8GB for a single disc. I just rip a mirror of the disc using vobcopy.
Vobcopy will rip a title, or a chapter or will recreate the exact copy of the disc as a mirror, all the VOB files, IFO files etc. That way you have everything, all extras and all menus. It is a mirror of the disc, no re-encoding.
If having a 8GB iso is not what you are after and you need to re-encode, well that will need you to rip each disc specially, that means to learn how the extras are laid out, what audio tracks are what etc. You can rip it all to separate files, but you will lose things like menus and other presentation elements which is why I just mirror the whole disc.
As I keep all my discs and use them as intended I don't need to worry about ripping extras if I don't need to. In my example I mirrored Red Dwarf S1 but that was just so I could avoid taking the disc on holiday (I was already taking other discs and had no room) and I didn't care to re-encode. I also simply deleted that rip when I was done with it as, well it's still on dvd.
But I do have some rips of DVDs I no longer have. I may have upgraded to the Blu-ray and wanted to rip the main title for eas of use when on holiday etc, or I simply didn't care enough to keep the dvd of something but I couldn't just not have a copy of that thing I didn't care much about. Thus I have ripped certain DVDs that I don't intend to keep, only the main titles and no extras. I only rip what I can't be bothered much about so I really can't see the point in ripping the extras for something that is just above the "delete" key lol.
Encrypt the files before uploading and no service will be able to spy on you.
yt-dlp downloaded it fine.
I found that there are at least 3 types of HDD user.
I looked at one once and it died.
In fact I tend to kill Seagate's a lot lol, I generally avoid the brand.
A head crash will not destroy data.
It will only damage the heads and damage the platters in a certain point but leave all data totally and easily recoverable.
If you want to wipe a drive quickly get a degausser or a shedder that shreds a drive down to less than 3mm bits.
Go onto Amazon and buy a new drive, they are dirt cheap. Heck you could get a usb-c one for future proofing.
Then you can either keep the discs or just copy everything off. Saves all that tedious faffing about with endless searching, downloading, indexing. Unless you enjoy that, which I don't, you'll get bored out of your skull and give it up for a while to play Hogwarts Legacy or something, then come back a year later to continue only to find the law got involved and killed the trackers you were relying on and you also have no idea where you got to anyway.
I'd just spend pocket money on a drive ;)