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I was also surprised when I noticed all my dreamcast backups were completely rotten - I thought discs were meant to last forever...

Instead now I have an active 50TB NAS with disk swapping once in a while... but it's not at all "durable" the way I thought things should be when I was younger... it's actively monitored instead.

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I believe the issue is that the dye that is used to burn the disc starts to degrade, especially on cheaper discs. I think pressed CDs can last a lot longer because of this fact, since that's actual physical pits and grooves.

I am pretty convinced that there simply doesn't really exist consumer-writable data that you don't have to babysit.

There are (or at least used to be) "archive grade" CD-Rs, which were more expensive and used some kind of different chemistry for the surface.

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