While I agree for truly long term storage an external HD or tape backup are probably the wiseset bet... decent well maintained optical media "should" be good for a few years... I've had like 3 CD burners... over the last 5 or 6 years, and borrowed friends burners before that. all of the disks I've burned have worked on all of my regular CD rom drives, on several computers. Not counting failed burns, I have only ever had one disk go bad... and I was able to retrieve most of the data.