Nice timing there. My disc drive crashed just now, taking the entire OS down with it.

Well, I can't say I'll miss it much. It's been quite some time since I last burned a disc. They do offer a certainly vaguely-reassuring permeance, but unless cheap, reliable 100 GB discs become commonplace, I probably won't be burning more of them.

jwt27 wrote:

Nice timing there. My disc drive crashed just now, taking the entire OS down with it.

Your optical disc drive affected the OS on your hard drive..?

Jorpho wrote:

Your optical disc drive affected the OS on your hard drive..?

Yeah it stopped responding for some reason, then explorer.exe did the same, causing the task bar to freeze up too. Okay that's not quite the entire OS, but still.

Personally.... I think we as a society are going down the wrong path with storage. I want to own an actual copy of my music CD-ROMs. Same for movies. We are moving away from having physical hard copies of things.

Sure external hard drives have their uses - and I am warming up to them. But I would NEVER trash my DVD data backups. With an external drive on accident - dropping it, an electrical surge, maybe even a stray magnetic field, could wipe out the whole thing.

I won't even get started on cloud storage. Do you really want to be dependent upon an internet connection to access your data? Do you really want anyone and everyone to have access to it?

ncmark wrote:

With an external drive on accident - dropping it, an electrical surge, maybe even a stray magnetic field, could wipe out the whole thing.

But then, a DVD isn't entirely reliable either.

Tape storage is still huge; even Google is big on tape. Maybe the time is ripe for a revival of consumer-grade tape backup?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/25/the_state_of_tape/

Until chip memory becomes extremely cheap and reliable like disc media it will never die. Blu Ray allows me to write 25GB of data easily and have it stored.

The only bad thing I can say about dvd media is the time it takes to burn the disks. I have spent many weekends shoving disks into a machine every 20 minutes 🙁

I explored alternatives (usb sticks, offline harddrives) and I kept going back to discs for some reason. Maybe because of the percieved security that they'll work for a few years at least and I store them in decent isolated conditions.

I personally haven't experienced the reading symptoms the FUD always bring up. Infact I restored some decade old HD backup spanned on multiple DVDs recently without issue.

I still like having games/software on physical media when I buy them.
CDs/DVDs are still my first choice for OS boot and recovery. I think dumping optical media is still premature.

Stojke wrote:

Blu Ray allows me to write 25GB of data easily and have it stored.

Isn't that still really expensive relative to the cost of another hard drive? I haven't been keeping track.

Most data can be sourced online. My personal data (pictures, videos, documents): pretty limited. 🤣

I always had a hard time understanding people with 100s/1000s of diskettes / CDs / DVDs.

I figured as much since I haven't burned many in the last few years. I still have some spools of DVD+R and CDR's around and need to order some DL DVD's. Never bothered with Blueray and probably won't.

Most of my backups are on tape (DDS or LTO mostly) with files I use quite a bit on portable USB2 externals (using laptop HDs, RD1000 disks, flash sticks). I do have a few TB's worth of online files, videos, music on a server.

People rely too much on hard drives for backups, but if they used tape they would probably think about what they really need saved and what they don't care about (and have less need for a new HD).

I suspect some plants will keep making recordable media for a while or at least stockpile it at a warehouse to last a few generation. You can still buy floppy disks after all.

Well shoot, what are people like myself going to do who have only CD players in their cars? 🤣

King_Corduroy wrote:

Well shoot, what are people like myself going to do who have only CD players in their cars? 🤣

Well there will still be other brands available - TDK, Imation - but T/Y used the original dies and were the most compatible.
I still have old CD-R writers (not DVD writers that also write CDs) and they will NOT work with the newer phthalocyanine CD-Rs

I'm in the process of backing up all my stuffs OneDrive. In Microsoft we trust.

Jorpho wrote:

But then, a DVD isn't entirely reliable either. […]
Show full quote

ncmark wrote:

With an external drive on accident - dropping it, an electrical surge, maybe even a stray magnetic field, could wipe out the whole thing.

But then, a DVD isn't entirely reliable either.

Tape storage is still huge; even Google is big on tape. Maybe the time is ripe for a revival of consumer-grade tape backup?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/25/the_state_of_tape/

Try listening to your music or watching a movie from tape backup. Out there somewhere is a company that is still making 8, 5.25, and 3.5 inch floppies. CD's, DVD's, and Blu Ray's aren't going to go away, either.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Well shoot, what are people like myself going to do who have only CD players in their cars? 🤣

I only have a cassette player in mine. LoL. And I still see blank cassettes for sale in stores sometimes.

A couple years ago I bought 200 TY DVD+R discs. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to save 3 bucks and got the kind that didn't have a printable/writable surface on them. I hate how they have a shiny and slippery writing surface and look the same on both sides.

They're amazing discs though. They are the only discs I've found that work correctly on a very old DVD player and a PS2. The people at cdfreaks also seem to think they're just about the best thing ever, except maybe for "archival" discs that nobody really wants to pay for.
I don't use DVDs to back up computer files anymore, but there are numerous other uses where they occasionally come in handy. Not in large volume, though.

So now I need to think about whether I should buy any more. I still have plenty of them, but I do use old tech devices so they will probably have value to me for a very long time.
I don't have any TY CDRs, so that's something I should probably get a spindle of. My CDRs are generic rebranded cheapies.

As good as the discs are, their spindles are a joke. If anybody is buying these, get them in shrinkwrap, not on a spindle. They have the cheapest most flimsy spindles I've ever seen, and they don't even have a foam spacer to keep the discs from clattering around in shipping. Shrinkwrap is the way to go, just recycle an old spindle.

I really need optical discs for my old retro games. I haven't seen anything in the way of ODD emulators, but the writing is on the wall. Something like a GOTEK, but for optical drives. With CD Audio support please 😀

Yeah the writing is on the wall. Unfortunately, things seem to be at the mercy of market forces.

For a long time I used the Maxell high grade DVD disks. You could get packs of five of them at Wal-Mart for around $6.50 if I recall. They were simply THE best... better than T/Y. They were worth their weight in gold.

Unfortunately, they disappeared, I suspect because most people simply don't know the difference. They want to pay $10 for a spindle of 50 (never mind the fact that half of them will be unreadable a year later).