With an external hard drive enclosure, it's easy (and cheap) to backup all your music and data to a hard drive, which you can then put in a safe deposit box in the bank. I have 2 such hard drives, which "rotate" between home and bank. In addition, I backup audio to CD and data to DVD and store copies of those in the bank as well.
Redundancy and automation are the key. Every data file I have is backed up in at least 8 locations (2 offsite). Every song I create is backed up in those 8 locations, plus 7 audio CDs (2 of which are mailed to family), for a total of 15 lossless copies [plus mp3 versions backed up to 8 locations and uploaded to 1 or 2 remote servers]. I wrote scripts to perform the backing up for me, so that I don't have to think about it. I just click an icon when I am ready to back up.
Of course, this doesn't really address the original question: lifespan of cdrs. I guess my response is: "if you have lots of backups on lots of media types in lots of locations, you don't need to worry so much about the lifespan of any one copy".
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