All man-made things fail. Like Analog-X, I've had some interesting experience with CD's that were supposed to have code, and they do, but I can't get to them. They aren't scratched... they were burned with some other software I no longer use, but the media was never "locked"... that is.. never closed for other software to access it. So it's an open disk ready to be written to by the original software.

Fortunately when it comes to CD's, I believe in redundancy. There's going to be one or two other CD's with the data somewhere on it. What I do with my Bryce stuff is keep a bunch of CD's, now DVD's, with all the stuff on it. I manually verify the burn. The original data is then moved to another hard drive on my network. There's at least two network drives where the data exists.

Now that I have so many projects, I've begun to zip all the Br5 files. The Br6 tend to be compressed already. I leave the jpg of the projects untouched so I can see what the zip's are without having to open them.

What I don't have is a good indexing system. When I need to find what's on a DVD.... I have to look into the DVD.