That story is BS. Magnetic tape is known to have a relatively short life
span before you start getting I/O errors. I have worked with many large IBM
mainframe systems and tape I/O problems are frequent. We always made 2
copies of anything that was critical, and assumed they were worthless after
5 years. If we needed anything longer than 5 years then we copied the old
tape to a new tape.

Nah.

The resin which makes up the writable surface of most writable disks
may eventually fail through entropy, but I have many which are older
than that and are still readable (I started mucking with CDRs in about
1997, and have many disks written back then which are fine). It will
obviously vary. I agree about the storage environment playing a factor.
Nothing better for cooking a disk than leaving it on a car's dashboard
on a sunny August afternoon.

However, I have encountered one disk I wrote way back in 'the day'
which I could no longer read; for important data, the risk's too great.
For my 35-odd GB of digital photos, I just this past week bought some
'archival' quality DVDRs; the writable surface is apparently a
micro-thin layer of gold. The expected lifespan of media written to
these disks is ***300 YEARS***. I'd call that better than a tape any
day of the week.

Besides - a tape is a 'mechanical' piece of gear - a hardware problem
in the reader could in theory gobble the tape ribbon around a spindle,
stretch it to the point of destruction, snap it entirely, or some such.
Plus, tape archiving being a sequential-access medium would be _far_
too inconvenient for me to use on a regular basis.

If you're concerned, maybe research the gold archive-quality disks. The
company who makes the ones I bought is caled "MAM-A". Their DVDs are
still quite new, but their gold CD-Rs are apparently quite respected. I
feel much better now that I've offloaded my photos onto them. ;-)

Cheers,

BD.