It is now an acknowledged technological fact that early music CDs are starting to fail. This apparently is due to some unexpected problem in the method by which they were made.

But that won't really cut any ice with the person who shipped all their vinyl LPs to the local charity shop (complete with their character-making clicks, skips and hiss) and replaced their entire collection with CDs, only as time has passed to witness them suddenly just not working.

This failure problem hasn't gone away with the later disks either nor with DVDs or, as I understand it, with Blu-Ray disks either.

The problem is in the chemical structure of these things but rather than move into the techno-realm let me just look at it this way.

I have already discovered some of my data DVDs are starting to fail. Little spots, blemishes and failures can be spotted appearing in the disks surface. I have just binned an entire stack of around 75 dvds which, although brand new are all showing signs of failing before I've even used them.

So here we are. Technology we were told would last forever is failing in a very, very short time.

The possible life expectancy of a DVD depends on who made it and how it's made but the very best estimate I can find is still only 300 years and even that is with very, very exact storage parameters. In the worst case it seems some will only last 2 years !!!!

And what about your own burned CDs? Well looking on the web I found that unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD.

Scary huh?

So lets look at our previous, conventional forms of historical storage.

CDs replaced tapes. And, as I say CDs were going to revolutionise our music as they would never degrade. Well we know that's wrong now don't we?

And how long would the seriously out moded old cassettes last compared to CDs?

10 to 15 years seems a pretty average bet.

Before the cassette was the reel to reel tape. How long does that last? Possibly around 60 years according to Ampex. Again quite a bit better than the miracle cd. Oh and the good old VHS tape can be expected to last as much as 60 years and then some.

And this applies to Betamax tapes as well. In fact I've recently been going through masses and masses of old home recorded Beta and VHS tapes and the oldest, a betamax recorded around 25 years ago is absolutely brilliant quality still.

Then we have digital photography of course.

Now ignoring the fact that we're likely to store the pictures on a hard disk (general life expectancy of 3 to 5 years - honestly!) or a USB stick (maximum of 10 years) or a cd/dvd (previously dicussed) the only remaining option is to print them out. Now here's another snag. Most modern photo printing is done either by ink jet or laser printers even if you take your original data to a photographic store.

So how long will it last on high quality ink jet paper? According to Ilford..... 10 years tops!

As for laser, at the moment they're quoting 100 years for the top quality stuff but I suspect that for the more common papers it will be a lot less.

Already some laser images of mine, printed on good quality laser paper are showing distinct fading of the reds.

But Granny's old B&W pictures from the early 1900 are still sharp and (as long as they were chemically well fixed) likely to last a lot longer yet.

My point (finally I hear you cry) is this. As we move forward we seem destined to consigning the records of our past onto more and more flimsy methods of archiving. Considering the upsurge in digital photography where "Don't like it so delete it" is the order of the day, we are constantly consigning millions of potential memories to the digital waste bin in the blink of an eye. In the old days you shot 36 pictures on a roll; 10 were good but we kept the other 26 anyway only to laugh uproariously at them some 30 years on because of the style of Uncles Ernies hair/shirt/shoes/suit etc. That's a bygone era now with the inconstancy of digital media.

When you look at the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians written around the 'recent' 5 millennia ago and compare their longevity to things such as the Sony e-book and the Amazon Kindle, I think my money will be going on safe bet of the stone tablets and parchment/paper users for keeping our history safely stored.

Otherwise in a 100 years time we'll have no history at all which is older than a matter of years.

I think that's a terrible shame and an even more terrible loss.