It wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data wa

It wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data was important I wouldn't have left it on degrading optical media that I didn't trust. Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.