"Ian Stirling" wrote in message
...
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 18:09:27 GMT, Ian Stirling
wrote:

and you run thourough data integrity tests every so often.

But you won't though ! If it's spinning, you have a much higher degree

Actually, I have, twice put my entire stack of backup CD/DVDs (some 400)
through a verify process - every file that read correctly originally
(there
were burn errors) still has the same MD5 sum.

Did you read the raw data to see if the media was growing errors?
If it was you can predict how long it will be before the error correction
fails and you lose the data.