Exceptional data life is one of Kodak's design criteria, determining the choice of all materials used in making Kodak writable CDs, particularly the recording layer. Stored in an office or home environment, the lifetime should be 100 years or more. Accelerated-aging tests, which speed up the reactions of decay, can determine the rate at which slow chemical changes can make discs unreadable. When tested this way, Kodak writable media stored under archival conditions showed a life expectancy of around 200 years. While this is a powerful advantage for CD data storage, there are other important aspects to consider.
Data stored on CDs is encoded in digital form.
First the data must be read by player devices, then it is converted into music, text, pictures, and so on by software programs. Migration of digital data from one storage medium or software standard to another is essential. Because migrating data requires effort and expense, there is a risk that it will be neglected. History teaches that many things are preserved only by accident, merely because they were tough enough to endure until they could be valued once more by new owners, who saw them through new eyes. It's comforting to know that CDs, because of their century or more life expectancy, will physically survive long enough to be rediscovered by new generations.