CD-R has a much wider range of compatibility than CD-RW, so if you're looking to play music you'll probably want to go with CD-R.
And as for data, I wouldn't use a CD at all. Optical Media is absolute shit for data preservation and those early claims of lasting thousands of years are highly exaggerated, the backing on the CDs (and DVDs) lasts for a few decades at most.
If you insist on optical data backups you'll want archival grade discs that are made of glass instead of plastic and don't use glue on foil for the backing but even those are projected to last hundreds of years at most, and they're not cheap.
Wow I did not know this. I was going to back up some photos onto CD-R as an extra safeguard. I have it backed up on a hard drive and cloud currently but wanted another back up. Will look into something else now.
M-Discs will do the trick for a couple centuries, which should exceed the span in which the data needs to be stored. Requires a burner that can handle the discs though.
That "pretty much" is doing a lot of lifting. They're not commonplace in laptops now, but industrially they're still quite common. Same is true of tape backups, which the average consumer would swear is dead tech. If you want to store your files perpetually on disc, you'll be able to get a reader for that disc easily enough 50+ years from now. It just may not be installed by default.
Considering we still have vinyl players and that techs over 50 years old, it's not too far of a stretch to believe cd tech will still be around in another 50 years.
1973 was 50 years ago, vinyl fully replaced shellac around the 60s, but the flat circle records that we know of have been around since like the late 20s or so. So way over 50 years.
Vinyl mainly still exists because it is the one lasting technology that is analog music recording technology. CD on the other hand is the first technology of the digital age there when it comes to music. It has no real benefits or distinguishing features over other digital storage (of music or data) to keep it alive.
You may already know this, but CD-R/RW are less stable than a real factory made CD, and will probably last less long than a hard drive/sd card/whatever if it's not in active day to day use
Words carved into stone is your best bet. Have GPT-4 describe each picture in a thousand words, then carve those words into the wall of a very deep cave.
Later if you need the picture back you can just put those thousand words in as a prompt to Dalle