Some of the writeable CDs I made 20 years ago are still readable. (Some contained music digitized from cassettes that were already 20 years old ... not in very

Some of the writeable CDs I made 20 years ago are still readable. (Some contained music digitized from cassettes that were already 20 years old ... not in very good shape either.) In 2005 I ripped hundreds of commercial music CDs to 192k mp3s on a new 80G SATA drive. (Kept the CDs in Logic cases - seem to be fine.) For 12 years that drive sat untouched in a cardboard box, in a closet. Then put it into an external USB enclosure and copied all 45Gs to my then-current HD. All good. (That little-used 80G HD failed within a year.) Since, drive-to-drive. OTOH the B&W family photos from most of a century ago (the bulky albums thrown away) seem as good as when I first saw them. Like most of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers, culture is always transient. As were films on nitrate. As are most consumer 'easy solutions'. Archiving & preservation rewards the effort. Thanks mostly to the efforts of the old-time-radio fans, I can still listen to shows from the 1930s.