Preservation of correspondence

Chuck Guzis wrote: Well said :) If the optical media were enclosed in a case (CD caddies, anyone?) then at least it would go some way toward preventing damage from scratches, fingerprints etc. I've seen CD media that's only four years old, has been dry-stored in original cases and away from light which has huge rot spots all over the discs - so it seems that deterioration can easily happen naturally even in good conditions with certain discs. Then of course there are huge potential incompatibility issues between the media, the drives, and the authoring process. It seems there's no way of knowing that a disc written in one drive will be at all readable in a different drive - not something you want for backups! All of which raises interesting questions for preservation; we know that the average person makes no backups - but even if they do, they're likely to be on CD these days, which raises interesting questions as to how much will have survived 20 years down the line. I don't believe that the level of recoverable data will be as high in 20 years as it is now for 20 year old floppies... cheers Jules