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The shelf life is FAR longer than Slashdot nerds would have you believe.
No one specified a time frame here, certainly not the original story.

As far as I'm concerned, 100 years is more than adequate. Beyond that its someone elses problem.

The technology will change and people will have to move the data to another media well before then.

I've been burning optical media since about 1995. Back then a CD burner cost almost $2000 and the discs were $15 each.

I can say, with certainty, that well stored optical discs absolutely do NOT come anywhere close to meeting the shelf lives that are claimed by manufacturers today.

Of the gold discs I have from the mid 90's 100% of them are still readable, but beyond that, virtually every make and brand of media I've got has varying levels of failures up to about four or five years ago. So far I haven't had any fail since then. The failure rate approaches 100% for discs, regardless of brand, bought and burned between maybe nine and twelve years ago. I stopped burning CDs around that range of time, but my DVDs from that period have nearly as high failure rates, as well. I'd say the interim years its probably more like 10-20%, but it'll be five more years until I know if they start to fail at the same rate.

Keep in mind the warranty periods are based on two things -- the fact that virtually no one will ever file a claim for a replacement media, and the fact that the warranties explicitly do not cover losses of the data on the media. They can say 100 year shelf life because in five years if the media fails, no one is going to exchange it for a new version of a media they no longer use regularly, anyway.

The fact is, there's *no* single media durable enough for even mid-term storage at modern data densities. (And by mid-term, I mean "boy I'd like this pictures of my kids to still be readable when they get married" kind of range. Old megabyte-sized harddrives and old 80, 160, maybe 320KB floppies are largely still readable, if you can find the interfaces and hardware. Older low-density tapes are, too, but as I learned the hard way, if you don't write on the tape what software you used to record it, you're pretty much SOL if you want to read it in the future.

Effortless media-shifting is the only real solution these days -- keep copying them from one computer to another.

The shelf life is FAR longer than Slashdot nerds would have you believe.
No one specified a time frame here, certainly not the original story.

As far as I'm concerned, 100 years is more than adequate. Beyond that its someone elses problem.

The technology will change and people will have to move the data to another media well before then.

This is silly.

Without a computer he will have no need of this data.

Agreed! Assuming he just wants to get back to 'where he was' on a computer, doing a massive printout and eventual OCR is lame. Besides, paper is flammable. So assuming that after whatever disaster (fire, flood, zombies...) you still can buy a new, working computer:

Just burn everything you want to an Archival Grade Gold DVD-R (rated to 100 years, I assume once you're dead you don't care) and keep it in a fire safe.

Once the 'disaster' happens, you just reload the data on to your new computer.

http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/professional-optical/archival-grade-gold-dvd-r/

You are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is for tools that will tell you the disc is suffering from bitrot before it becomes unreadable.

These tools exist. I have run across them. Unfortunately, they only work on certain model drives that have the ability to report internal measurements.
Qpxtool supports about 45 drives from 8 manufacturers. Qpxtool measures recoverable and unrecoverable errors (PI/PIF), Jitter/Beta, FE/TE (Focus Error/Tracking Error).
http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/

pxlinux was similar, however they got threatening letters and/or lawsuits from the company that makes plextools (parent company of plextor).
PXscan/PXview runs under windows (pxlinux is a port of PXscan/PDview), had the same problem.
Qpxtool doesn't seem to have the same problem.

Nero appears to have some sort of disk quality test.
Windows software for testing before your record (FE/TE): http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=192488

Here is another program that might work on any drive but may not report there is a problem as early. It times how long the drive takes to read each sector.
If the drive has to reread a sector, that takes longer. Some drives reportedly either read full speed or fail (probably means they don't have any retries).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdck/

dvdisaster records additional recovery information. The author was apparently able to recover data from a disk after carrying it around in a backpack
with no sleave. It records one ECC block per 223 sectors and can tolerate up to 32 read errors per block. The error correction files can be stored
on separate media (it looks like one disk could store ECC information for a couple hundred disks).
http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/en/

I have also noticed (on some damaged discs from a friend) that the dd program stops when there is a read error but the sdd program has the option to retry.

Record your data to multiple disks (preferably different brands) using the exact same ISO image (burn the same image multiple times or copy your disk) and store them in different locations. This gives you a form of software raid. If someone hasn't already written it, it would not be hard at all to write a program that will
read a disk to an ISO image on the hard drive, retrying bad sectors and recording a list of sectors it was unable to read. Then try to read those missing sectors from a different disc. A more sophisticated version might ask the drive to return the data even in the event of a CRC error and do majority rules for each byte
of the sector across three or more source disks. For added protection, use different brand drives to record the disks.

Deterioration reportedly tends to start on the outside of the disk, so if you only record half a disks worth of data it may last longer. Or use dvdisaster.

Levels of deterioration:
- Detectable only by reading internal parameters from the drive
- Drive can read the sector after multiple tries (detectable from timing)
- Drive gives up but you may be able to issue multiple read commands and get the data
- Permanent failure. May still be able to get data if you have recorded redundant info using a tool like dvdisaster
- so many read errors, or damaged lead in, such that full recovery is impossible

As far as the original problem of protecting films, I would consider the following:
- Use archival quality single layer DVD+/-R media.
One example: http://www.verbatim.com/optical/archival/ (about $1.50 each)
- Use a drive

Really? I'm buying stock in Verbatim!

Looks like Verbatim and Imation already have their LightScribe DVDs out.

Actually, I think you'll be surprised.

One of the developers of the media in conjunction with HP is Verbatim. They know how to produce media and make it affordable and competitive. Even in this day of cheap toss'em discs.

30pk Spindle 700 MB CDR

30pk Spindle 4.7 GB DVD+R

And this is what they've got listing on their site now before the product is released.

It seems that LightScribe is going to actually be marketed competitively enough where it might have a chance.

Actually, I think you'll be surprised.

One of the developers of the media in conjunction with HP is Verbatim. They know how to produce media and make it affordable and competitive. Even in this day of cheap toss'em discs.

30pk Spindle 700 MB CDR

30pk Spindle 4.7 GB DVD+R

And this is what they've got listing on their site now before the product is released.

It seems that LightScribe is going to actually be marketed competitively enough where it might have a chance.

The article writer was almost exactly paraphrasing verbatim.

Who the hell is Verbatim?

Apparently Verbatim makes CDs, DVDs and other storage devices. I find their writing fascinating and I just subscribed to their newsletter.

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A second hand SCSI drive is relatively cheap, last I bought a 10k drive, it was $50 for a 9GB. SCAs are even cheaper since the need for an adaptor for anything that doesn't have a backplane ups the cost in other systems. It looks like E450 has one.

I'm not going to discount the cheep scsi drives... they are indeed cool. But we are talking shell script driven MP3 here, no real need for 10k drives nor SCSI when a DVD+r will do. $100 for the drive to do dvd(-/+)r9, and we are talking 8.5gig/disc. We are talking $15/disk presently, but that is far better then any used scsi drive as far as cost/meg.

But if we were to not talk about the DVD-/+R9 and stick to the more common DVD-/+R, we are talking 4.7gig/disc@about $2.00 a pop and a nice indash DVD player. Or if you really want more in the way of tracks at your fingertips, then a nice 6-10disc auto changer. Far more space effective then a stack of 3.5inch HDs.

What's the longevity of a DVD-R, especially the cheap ones?

This PDF spec on Verbatim's site throws out a figure of 100 years for General Use DVR-R discs. Another PDF I've seen on Pioneer's site says the same thing, but in reference to DVD-R for Authoring discs. We use the latter at the office since Pioneer suggested to us that the Authoring discs are better for archival purposes. The discs are probably 2-3 times the price of General Use discs, but for securing source code, etc. it's worth it.