i put entirely too much faith in CDs and moved all my photos to them many years ago only to have the metal flake off and all the data was destroyed. We had this common misconception that the metal that stored the data was actually encapsulated in the plastic but I now know from exeperience that this was not the case. I lost a ton of data because of this.

It seems as though you have been involved in computing at least as long as I have ! :)