Introducing: Techdonkey!

Elaine's Techdonkey.com Antique Museum of writable disks. :-)

Storage CDs and DVDs are now PAST expected end-of-life. Save your files now.

Back in the old days the writable or rewritable Compact Disc (CD), or DVD was sold to us all as the best, cheapest, and most long-lasting way you could store your precious files. Quite often, when you took a roll of film in for developing, a bonus service was that they would include a CD of your images along with your prints and negatives. Napster and Limewire were in hot demand, and “mixtape” CDs proliferated.

“Ur files will be safe foreveerrrrrrrr!” they said

Forever turns out to be only a few years

Despite how they marketed these consumer CDs and DVDs to us, storage CDs and DVDs have a finite lifespan (so much detail at that preceding link), depending on the type and quality of the disk, and how it was written. Some of these disks would be rated to last 2 to 5 years. Some are averaged at 10 to 20 years. All except the very tip top quality disks of an exact manufacture type are within the window of failure NOW.

Try this first: Save your files yourself

I mean, sure, this is a service Techdonkey offers, but you might not need to spend the money hiring Elaine. You can try to save them yourself first if you have a CD/DVD drive in your computer.

For disks with files and folders (photos, documents, etc): you can simply copy your files to your hard drive, and they’ll be included in your ongoing backups.
For audio mixtapes and DVDs that are playable as DVD movies, you’ll need to “rip” the contents — just copying will not work. There are various kinds of software for this.
If your disk is UNREADABLE, or the files partially boogered, don’t lose hope. (Well… lose some hope, but not all hope.) Some readers are better than others, and there exists software that may allow a byte-for-byte copy to be made of the contents and saved to a hard drive, and that can aid in retrieval.