- bsmart

WARNING The ability for homemade CDs to retain data beyond 3-5 years is suspect. The method of burning is different from factory made CDs and subject to deterioration. I have seen TV news reports saying this about photos stored to CDs and have seen it on software that we distributed to customers on CD a few years back ( about 20% unusable after 3 years and possibly 50% after 4 years) One friend of mine who is a software contractor/consultant is taking the time to move all his archived files back on to hard disk and reburning them to DVD. He doesn't figure the DVD will last much longer but in 2-3 years he will reburn them to a newer (and more dense) media. One benifit of this process is that what took 5-6 CDs easily fits on one DVD (sometimes even more)