
Do you think the researchers managed to gain access to the data?
If your answer is "Yes", how did they manage to get hold of the data?
If your answer is "No", why couldn't they gain access to the data?
Unfortunately they couldn't gain access to the data because all the CDs had faded over the years and the data on them couldn't be read. All the effort and time that have gone into the research over the years have been wasted by not putting simple precautions in place at the begining of the research.
The moral of this story is that data should never be stored on CDs in the long term. The master copy should always be stored on networked drives, and more importantly, the backups should regularly be restored to see if the data is retrievable at any time.