The oldest CDs that were made on our single speed Cd burner in 1993 are still working fine. The disk media was from an obscure company called Taiyo in Japan (at $30 a piece!!!). They are stored in my office (no air conditioning, no light protection, open windows in the summer, lots of changes in humidity and temperature). I also have commercially produced CDs that are about 20 years old that show no signs of deterioration. The cds have (ink) writing on them, some have labels, and all of them are working fine. Since there is really no exact way to determine at what point data is being compromised or totally lost, going with manufacturers' recommendations for storage is probably best. We also have DVDs that were burned here and are now older than ten years. We have not encountered any problems either. Otmar Foelsche *********************************************** LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for Language Learning, and The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (http://consortium.dartmouth.edu). Join IALLT at http://iallt.org. Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask]) ***********************************************