archival cd-r - really true?

Judging from the time it takes my drive to seek to other tracks, which is nowhere as fast as the seek rate of my hard drive, I suspect there;s some sort of search algorithm being used. And regardless of the drive, if the inner tracks are damaged, there's an excellent likelihood that the drive will refuse to mount the CD. How about this as an arbitrary test of the recoverabiliy of a medium? What I call the "pinking shears" test. Maybe some remember it from an episode Take the medium and cut it into randomly sized peices, with the mean being about the size of a postage stamp, using pinking shears. Pick up most, but not all, of the peices, throw them into an envelope and ship them across the country. How much data can you reconstruct from the fragments? You know, floppies aren't all that bad for storing data... Cheers, Chuck