T1B

Some guy at my work just told me that the useful life of CDs and DVDs you burn at home is like 2-5 years. I told him he was full of shit.

Any truth to this? I backed up all my digital pictures onto DVD RW discs and put them in our safety deposit box in case of fire or something like that. If these things aren't going to be any good in "2-5 years", I need to come up with a different backup plan.

I havent heard anything about that.

But if you are worried, try a flash drive or external hard drive to save your pictures.

If there's any truth to it, it would be because the disks themselves would get damaged through normal wear and tear. Sounds like you're not handling these disk all of the time, though.

Having always used CDs for backup, I can use older disks (9-10 years old) perfectly fine. I might suggest an external HD, like Mr T says - to duplicate your important files.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... =R301-1134

The discussion is far from over. What your friend was possibly refering to was the fact that Writable/Re-Writable CDs are considered to be new so there is not a good set of data to know exactly how long the data will be reliable. In theory CDs have a lot longer life then a tapes, but its not proven yet so its considered unknown. If you are really worried, you might consider re-writing your data every few years until the exact life of CDs are known for sure.

I have CD Roms burned from 1999 that still work fine. I've heard this rumor myself, but agree that every few years would be just a precaution worth taking.