I had a pre-emtive strike at archiving on CDR last night and bugger me if a TDK blank refused. My cheapo 80 min ones (for the price of a pack of mints) saled through without a hiccup. More scratches & without even a top/bottom identifier and not much to distinguish even that. BUT at least I got to first base.
The TDK refuser has no physical clue to its failure.
I think the Gold disks at ten times the price are going to be the best gamle.
The music industry had this as well. They recorded on VHS tapes with an industry standard digital archiving process, except Decca who invented their own. Ten years later and they find that not only are they getting print through (literally the magnetic domains from the spiral layer above changing the bits) BUT the tape was sticking together and ripping-of the magnetic particals. The solution was to bake the tapes and that mostly worked. Music has been lost in that archive format forever.
Decca did not have that problem because they used reel to reel and the tape used different binders for the magnetic particles.
The moral is - Duplication & Using different media spreads the risk.
No how reliable is the Aural / Oral tradition?