I recently read an alarming article about how long a CD or DVD you can write yourself should last (Not factory-made CD's or DVD's such as music cd's).

Theoretically they should last up to several decades.
In reality they last about 2 to 5 years (max. 10) when using good quality media and proper storage.

The "R" (write once) => organic dye => degrading over time
The "RW" (rewritable) = > heat-sensitive cristals => degrades twice as fast as the "R"-kind

When buying cheap, you could end up buying old and already degraded stock or low quality, hence further reducing their usefull life.

I just want to warn "the good people at ets" to be carefull about storage. I'd hate to hear that people lost their precious photo's or other data due to degrading of CD's or DVD's.

The conculsion of the article:
- safest bet = (have them professionally printed) printing your digital photographs
- If you store on CD or DVD => migrate your data to new CD/DVD at least every 2 years.
- Alternatives such as external harddisks, tapes, flash memory are vulnerable too.

The only way to be sure (I hope)?
<img src="/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />- store a copy elsewhere (as stated above)
- migrate data to new optical media every 2? years
- keep/make prints
- store on external disk

All in all pretty cumbersome ...
I'm still in analogue "film" photography and am thinking about migrating to digital (slr). <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />Just don't know what the best strategy is to make sure my grandchildren can see photographs of their parents being kids. Kids are 2, 4 and 6.

Where's the time of the good old "silver prints" of the original black and white photography => they should last longest (or is this a myth to)?

This article was not from specialised press, just a local newspaper, so i don't know how reliable it is.

Hope some of you found it usefull.

Greetings