CD-R Life Spans
I’ve read a bunch of articles like this and never quite know what to make of them. Probably I should copy my archive CDs and DVDs now and then, but I have discs going back nine years or so, and the checksums still verify. (I never burn raw files to disc; they’re always packed into a disk image so that I can verify that the data is OK.)
Granted, it's not data that I'm worried about losing, but I have an old disc that's probably not even a high-quality product. It was the single freebie disc that was bundled with a very old SCSI CD burner that only burned at 1X. The data on that 12-year-old disc is still readable...even on my newer drives.