Yea well I'm not looking to keep my Poser files for 100 years... 6 years is a good enough stretch to me. It won't happen with cds - with current cd-drives. That is because of the data amounts needed to be beacked up! Only 1 unco-operative CD spoils a decent back-up plan. Backing up 50 gigs... once a week ... with guaranteed working back-ups (I keep 2 back-ups)... Lots of cds... I've already experienced that. RReynolds talks about optical medias life-time... however HOME BURNT CDs are a different story altogether - they are TOTALLY different story than professionally created optical storage disks that are meant to hold data. In many cases, as I pointed out already, the facts that cd-writers and readers use exotic standards (yep, different manufacturers make their own "standards" when it suits them) make the cds burnt home not readable by other drives - I've seen it happen multiple times. I have burnt cds at home that can be read only by old 4x cd-readers etc etc. CDs are a good media for transportation of data, but for back-ups... for stuff I've paid money for ... not my choice. Just 3 days ago I experienced an event at work: two burnt cds could not be read by my work comp's cd-reader. I used another cd on another pc over lan - that is not always possible. But I guess everybody makes their choices.