My classiccmp non-retirement :-)

You cannot rely on a CD (not even a pressed CD) for anything important. You need at least two CDs, preferably more. By the time you realise you were unlucky enough to hit the bad one in the batch, it is too late. I've had a few CD-Rs die and two DVD-Rs die. For stuff I care about, I burn to CD-R twice. I expect to take the whole lot and reburn to something else eventually. I keep waiting for the C3D or similar technology to surface (say 100GB per disc) but I'm still waiting. Given the drop in ?/GB of had drives lately, I may well put everything onto a spare drive in the meantime. The ISO ormat is well documented. If you ignore various copy-protections schemes, the for straight-forward normal CDs, I would be surprised if you cannot access one 100 years from now. You almost certainly won't be able to burn a new CD-R (since noone wil be making the media) but you will be able to access an ISO file. If you use something like Nero with its (I assume ...) undocumented .NRG format, you'll have to spin up an emulator and a copy of WXP with Nero. Convert to ISO before then and you should be OK. I'd be surprised if noone has a working DVD drive 50 years from now. Even the next generation stuff (HD-DVD) sounds like it will be able to read CDs. Surely reading ISO9660 image files will be possible essentially forever, unless we lose the standard (or the ability to program)! Being able to read the media may prove difficult beyond 100 years or so. As long as the current equivalent to CDROM remains based on rotating media that is read optically, modifying such a drive to read a CDROM will remain feasible. Once we move to something as different to CDROM as those are to floppy disk drives, then we will get to find out how hard it is to build a drive from scratch! Has anyone built a floppy drive from scratch? Without salvaging any mechanical parts or heads from an existing floppy? I'm assuming that electronic processing is not a problem (in principle) for either floppy disks or CDROMs/DVDROMs. Antonio