According to a piece published in the Dutch magazine PC Active, tests done on CD-R media show that data stored on the discs may start to degrade in as little as two years. Ouch.
The entire issue of long-term storage of digitial data is one that has received precious little attention. The future may be one in which giant swaths of the present are missing, thanks to legacy storage media or media that has succumbed to dreaded “bit-rot.”
Time to fire up the old dot-matrix printer and slot in a box o’ fan-fold paper, pappa’s got several decades worth of digital history to hammer out.