With the advent of CD burners at the end of the last millennium, many users began to save holiday and children’s pictures on cheap silver discs. With the DVD burners, the work was made a little easier thanks to the larger media capacity. The panes usually went to some cupboard, perhaps written on with a felt pen, printed with an inkjet or given a paper sticker.

Optimal storage conditions, i.e. absolute darkness and a constant temperature of 20 ° C, should only have prevailed in very few cases. The quality of the blanks and the interaction with the burner also play a role in the lifespan of the data. Between 10 and 49 years the discs should keep their data – the first self-burned CDs from the 90 years are therefore in the critical age. Today you can no longer be sure that the discs are still legible.

So now is the time to take care of it. Because the longer the disks lie around, the less chance there is of fetching the data from them. However, many households should no longer have PCs with optical drives, CDs and DVDs have disappeared from the lives of most users. A simple USB DVD drive hardly costs 20 Euro.

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