IBM expert warns of short life span for burned CDs | InfoWorld | News | 2006-01-10 | By John Blau, IDG News Service:

Unfortunately, it's true - the affordable option isn't the one that's going to last. Pretty much the same applies to DVDs.

You can, of course, take certain steps to helps your CDs and DVDs last - keep them in a reasonably temperature stable environment, with stable (and low) humidity - but if you're serious about safeguarding your data, tape is the only way to go.

"Companies, in particular, need to be constantly looking at new storage technologies and have an archiving strategy that allows them to automatically migrate to new technologies [...] Otherwise, they're going to wind up in a dead-end. And for those sitting on terabytes of crucial data, that could be a colossal problem."