I recently found an old spindle of DVDs that I burned a while ago, mostly with booty gathered from sailing the seas, if you will. I had a 100% success rate with

I recently found an old spindle of DVDs that I burned a while ago, mostly with booty gathered from sailing the seas, if you will. I had a 100% success rate with guessing which discs would be unreadable just by looking at them -- the recording layer had degraded so much over time that it was apparent to the naked eye. Luckily this was all stuff I had no issue with discarding, but if those discs had contained anything of sentimental value, I'd have been quite upset to find that they were basically useless now. > If you have anything worthy still on DVDs that still works, make a backup to keep it. And make sure to make it to multiple other formats, preferably including some sort of cloud storage. Solid state storage, especially modern small portable drives, are great if you use them often, but if you're planning to just copy stuff to them and leave them sitting unpowered for a long time, you should be aware that over time they too will suffer from data corruption. The charges in the storage cells don't leak fast, but they do leak. You gotta actively maintain your backups, even if that just means plugging the backup drive in every other month to check its' health.