Originally Posted by argon3030

There is no need to change the oil annually, that's an old myth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-yt5a1cWd4

Or at the very least, it may have been true at one time, but is no longer the case with modern oil formulations, especially good quality synthetics. That said, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable going beyond 5 years on the same oil. But this may be a good opportunity to validate this - take a sample of your 5-year-old oil and send to Blackstone Labs for an analysis. That would be $20 well spent I believe, and would certainly make for an interesting discussion here in the forums!

Can't speak to the filter, but for folks who are into really long drain intervals, I know they do replace the filter periodically between oil changes, so I would imagine the filter is the weak link here. Some of the VW TDI guys will go 25k on the oil, but replace the filter every 7.5k.

I have personally experienced oil filter failure before. What happened was not a disintegration of the filter media, nor did any pieces make their way into the engine. The filter media collapsed internally, but it all stayed inside the canister. The symptom was an erratic reading on the oil pressure gauge. This was on an older Porsche that had a factory oil pressure gauge on the dashboard. Without that gauge, there would be no other way to tell, but certainly the engine would be starved for oil in that scenario, resulting in excessive wear.