Yeah like floppy disks in the late 90s. They're now just for short term storage. Don't expect your data to still be there a year from now.

How about just use Blu Rays? 🤷‍♂️ They're coated by default, it's sort of a requirement.

I don't have a blu-ray recorder 😉
And I strongly suspect they may be subject to the same problem 😉

Ok. I just thought, because Blu-ray is still a current technology. So fresh blank media of acceptable quality could still be in production.

Btw, an USB Blu-ray recorder isn't so hard to come by in 2024.
Blu-ray drives appeared about 20 years ago in mid-late 2000s. It's about time to get one, IMHO. ;)

https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-18-blu-ray-d … ml?guccounter=1

Edit: On the bright side, requirements for precision increases with higher capacity.

So the mechanical side of a DVD/BD drive should be of higher precision, the optics should be better. Which in turn increases reliability/error tolerance with bad media.

Unless the drive has to resort to some tricks.
I heard that some drives didn't have different lasers for the wavelength used for CD/DVD/BD, but used a single laser and a squint (?) technique.

Such a drive might be less reliable with legacy media in direct comparison with a native CD or DVD drive.

Edit: There's another factor, maybe. I believe to remember that the firmware of a CD/DVD drive can recognize different brands of blanks CDs/DVDs (they have an ID, I believe).
If that's true, an outdated firmware might be the culprit that the recent blank DVD don't work reliable.

Edit: https://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

Update - I tried several more of those and with a different burner - I got one reasonable disk and two that wouldn't verify. Time for the trash bin.

It is pretty clear that we are at the end of optical storage. This is now the era of external drives. Even if good media WAS still made, a lot of the file sizes are just too big now for DVD to be practical. I can go out in a single afternoon and take enough pictures to fill 3-4 CD disks. I remember when I had a CD Mavica camera that use those 156 MB mini cd-r disks, and that seemed like a lot. Recently threw that camera out....so outclassed by what I have now and where do you get those disks anyway (other than ebay)

I still burn important files to Blu-Ray but the only media I now trust are Taiyo Yuden BD-R DL disks imported directly from Japan. These are not cheap.

Errius wrote on 2024-01-11, 02:20:

I still burn important files to Blu-Ray but the only media I now trust are Taiyo Yuden BD-R DL disks imported directly from Japan. These are not cheap.

This might be an option as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

ncmark wrote on 2024-01-07, 19:20:

I remember when I had a CD Mavica camera that use those 156 MB mini cd-r disks, and that seemed like a lot. Recently threw that camera out....so outclassed by what I have now and where do you get those disks anyway (other than ebay)

Cameras are a special case, I think.
A higher resolution sensor doesn't necessarily provide a better picture, it can be the exact opposite.

This has to do with noise and light sensitivity.
A big CCD or CMOS sensor with a low resolution catches more light rays.
So it can provide a sharper picture under bad lighting conditions.

There's a reason as to why fans of the astrophotography hobby did use cheap CCD webcams with 352x288 resolutions (CIF).

A popular mod was to remove (peel off) the IR filter and use a mounting adapter for the telescope's eye piece.

By using multiple photographies of same object, an ideal image could be extrapolated using special software.

That was late 90s/early 2000s.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-11, 05:27:

Cameras are a special case, I think. A higher resolution sensor doesn't necessarily provide a better picture, it can be the exa […]
Show full quote

ncmark wrote on 2024-01-07, 19:20:

I remember when I had a CD Mavica camera that use those 156 MB mini cd-r disks, and that seemed like a lot. Recently threw that camera out....so outclassed by what I have now and where do you get those disks anyway (other than ebay)

Cameras are a special case, I think.
A higher resolution sensor doesn't necessarily provide a better picture, it can be the exact opposite.

This has to do with noise and light sensitivity.
A big CCD or CMOS sensor with a low resolution catches more light rays.
So it can provide a sharper picture under bad lighting conditions.

There's a reason as to why fans of the astrophotography hobby did use cheap CCD webcams with 352x288 resolutions (CIF).

A popular mod was to remove (peel off) the IR filter and use a mounting adapter for the telescope's eye piece.

By using multiple photographies of same object, an ideal image could be extrapolated using special software.

That was late 90s/early 2000s.

I do not want to hijack the thread, but at least some variations on the theme of combining multiple exposures through software have made it into so-called "computational photography" implemented in many higher end smartphones and even into higher end standalone cameras.

I am referring to things like ( @ncmark in case you are curious and want to look into any of this)
- Pixel shift super resolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shift )
- combining exposure bracketed exposures to generate HDR or DR expansion
- combining focus bracketed exposures to increase depth of field while avoiding the resolution reduction (due to diffraction ) that a smaller aperture would cause
- exposure stacking to reduce noise (increase SNR)

There are probably other techniques that I am not familiar with (I'm just an amateur photographer who likes to read and try some tech tricks at times).

I didn't know that. Thanks for the information! ^^

Even though some might choose not to use optical media anymore, there is software to help determine the quality of your optical media. I am not so concerned that all media is no good, because that is unlikely right now. I am only concerned that there are sometimes just simply bad disks made in any batch sold. This software can help you weed those out and replace them:
https://dvdisaster.jcea.es/

I'm sure you'll find some brands are better than others doing the tests.

Gonna have to revisit this in 5-10 years. I never invested in good quality media. 95% of my CDs/DVDs were white-label, a few were Verbatim, and a very small amount of other brands. My experience was that the early discs from the white-label brands were bad and died soon, but those from just a few years later lasted much longer and most of them are still 100% readable. Maybe just a matter of luck.

I suppose that in a lot of ways there is not perfect storage solutions.

Looking back, I shudder at all the time that I spent burning DVD disks. scanning each disk, keeping a copy of each scan like a catalog - too much time, WAY to OCD

I think the reason is I refused to upgrade to XP for so long (because of the product activation crap.)

Now I'm curious whether or not my CD-Rs from 2004 are still readable. 😃
I have them stored burried in a cardboard box for ages..

Edit: I've never had true trouble with XP "activation". Back in the day, there were very, um, creative ways to handle the issue.

I think the most important thing to do was to invest in an authentic copy of XP, though, including the COA, for legal reasons.
Activating and, um, borrowing something are separate things, I believe.

Personally, I did have gotten myself quite a few boxed versions of WfW 3.11+DOS 6.22,
along with original COA w/ hologram.
Despite such ancient software not requiring any activation of some sorts.
It's simply a relief to have the complete thing, both from a morality and collector perspective. 🙂

I have cheapo CD-Rs I made around 2001 that still work just fine. Maybe I'm lucky.

I still burn critical data to BD-R DL discs. Not for archival purposes, but because they can't be easily accidentally wiped by me screwing up a file system command or accidentally exposing them to magnetic fields. I also put the data on HDD/Flash/Cloud. Data doesn't exist unless it's in multiple places 😉

For retrocomputing yes use DVD IDE drives and burn discs. To collect that retro shovelware. But for modern stuff why the hell use clumsy Bluray. Quality USB sticks with 256/512/1GB are dirt cheap. What is the practicality? Or if you want something big, an extrnal mechanical hard drive is an option.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-16, 16:44:

Edit: I've never had true trouble with XP "activation". Back in the day, there were very, um, creative ways to handle the issue.

I think the most important thing to do was to invest in an authentic copy of XP, though, including the COA, for legal reasons.
Activating and, um, borrowing something are separate things, I believe.

I've had a fair share of OEM XP Pro licenses that came with the laptops I purchased over the years. On a few of them I still would install a pirated version using a Volume License Key (VLK), just because it was easier than fiddling with the restore media and the affiliated bloat.

However I don't understand what upgrading or not upgrading to XP has to do with how one burns and archives DVD discs.

kingcake wrote on 2024-01-16, 17:23:

I still burn critical data to BD-R DL discs. Not for archival purposes, but because they can't be easily accidentally wiped by me screwing up a file system command or accidentally exposing them to magnetic fields. I also put the data on HDD/Flash/Cloud. Data doesn't exist unless it's in multiple places

I used to like DVD-RAM for backup purposes, for the nice random read/write ability. But m-a-a-a-a-a-n, is that media SLOW. And 4.7GB already in 2010 didn't feel like a lot. So nowadays, I'm doing something more similar to your method - using BD-R DL + secondary backup on a hard drive and sometimes storing extra copies at a family house or NAS.

Not all Verbatim discs are high quality. I know that in the case of Verbatim CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, at least, the ones with "AZO" or "DataLifePlus" branding are what to look for. The regular CD-Rs and anything branded "Life Series" are lower quality. Not sure off-hand about how good the "archival quality" "UltraLife" line is in comparison or the quality of their other disc formats.

More generally regarding archiving or backing-up data, I would say redundancy is advisable regardless of the media used. Don't just rely on the longevity of a single hard drive or recordable disc; maintain more than one copy in case one fails.