Optical media is cheap. REALLY cheap. Make extra copies, store the discs in a cool, dark place, and copy them onto new media every 3 years or so. Some optical discs can start to degrade after 4-5 years.

Take the “50 year life” claims with a LARGE pile of road salt! The commercial CD is barely 25 years old, and the photoreactive dye CD/DVD is not even old enough to see an R rated movie.

I’m having to write some serious black magic code to read some ancient CD-R discs that nothing commercial will even mount, let alone read.

And it’s looking like I’ll have to scratch build the actual drive electronics myself, too.

Take it from me, making copies would have saved me SO much grief.

Make copies, my friends. Make copies!

7 Years is enough storage time for anything except Payroll and ERISA statements, and does not run out the statute of limitation on some felonies, but in general you’re safe to purge that stuff.

One needs to gently & kindly ask: is this a delaying tactic for writing the Book? Again, been there, done that, my suite-mates in College always knew when I had a paper due because all of a sudden the bathroom would be immaculate (unusual with 4 college guys, even when 3 of them were gay) and everyone’s laundry would be done & folded …..

so my goal is still to get rid of most of my papers intentionally before i die instead of foisting them on people i already know don’t want them.

i love witnessing a beloved & respected artist make joy and literature out of the same ingredients that need to be trashed over here in my world.

well, except letters. i’m saving them all.

I can see using it for, say, cat litter. But I’d be cautious about using it compost –especially for a food-producing garden– because of the likely ink content, bleaching and photocopy chemicals, etc.

(Obviously, not much per individual sheet. But a whole pile of paper, accumulating over multiple-years and leached out through rain, etc, could bear watching.)

But you can compost shredded paper, or make homemade cat litter out of it, or use it as package stuffing – cross-shredded paper composts really nicely. We use it in the bottom of our compost bucket to soak up liquids & keep it from getting smelly too fast.