Hmm guess I was sleeping when I typed my initial comments.
Suggesting dvd's when you were looking for cd-r's.
I would so far only suggest to use TY or FUJI (made in germany not available in the USA) for cd-r's.
Most media seems to work fine for 3 years. But after the 3 years things start looking ugly.
Me and some friends had some media which we initially tested each year. The first year everything looked the same. We did this for 3 years. After year 3 we decided to leave the samples in their correct storage place ( dark cabinet), because so little happened. A few months ago I tried to read something back of a old cd-r which was burned at the same time and used a disc of one of the test batches. It turned out that the disc had become allmost unreadable. Luckilly my plextor 24/10/40A could retrieve the data. However, I decided to see what happened to special test disc's. It turned out that for the samples that I had, things didn't look that nice. I contacted the people who had the other disc's, made a few calls and the disc's were retested on the good old CDA3000 analyzer which we initially used as testing system. For comparisions we needed that tester ! Originally we also used mostly the allover quality score of the device. (Yeah that was a bit flawed. But hey it was years ago
) (Also, it seems that the actuall specific errors reported are quite close to what a benq 1640 can report with cdspeed. ). However in short the results so far suggest to use TY or FUJI if you want to be sure that your media is safe for 5 years, but I haven't got all data back in yet.When all data is in. I'm planning to make a large post or a small article of it.
So incase of five years or more I would definately recommend you to use TY.(I have TY cd-r's which are 10 years old and scan still fine.)
Trying to make something "foolproof" only forces nature to make a better fool.