neb:

1101:

 

CD/DVD writable are a terrible choice of media for that (RW even worse) . If the data is really important .
Its 2020 after all, not 1998  :-)

 

I've got 25-year-old archives on CD that are still perfectly readable. And since the media was cheap, I made two copies of each, and wrote copies of updated stuff every month or two to a new CD. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Wow. You're *incredibly* lucky. With the price of writers and discs back then very few people had them, and all CD-R discs were cyanine which is incredibly unstable.

I'd doubt there would be many CD-R discs of that age still readable.

I remember trying to salvage data about 10 years ago off a CD-R that I wrote in 1998 when I first got a CD writer and found it was dodgy.