I have a bunch of CD/DVDs that I've burnt and never ever used.

i have a box of CDs I burned 20-odd years ago, they are getting discoloured now and I can't be bothered to check whether they work yet.

I also keep all my old hard drives, goodness knows whether they will work if I ever fire them up. Basically when I used to upgrade, I'd copy the old stuff to the new (usually much larger) hard drive, then put the old drive away. My current PC has an archive of stuff from about 15-20 years back (XP era anyway).

I was so glad to see the end of 5.25" floppies, they always seemed crap even in the 1980s, but I have a box of the 3.5" ones with probably mainly old drivers and operating systems on. Never see the light of day either.

I worry more about current stuff and whether that will last.

kixs wrote on 2024-09-16, 12:24:

I have a bunch of CD/DVDs that I've burnt and never ever used.

ratfink wrote on 2024-09-16, 12:25:

i have a box of CDs I burned 20-odd years ago, they are getting discoloured now and I can't be bothered to check whether they wo […]
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i have a box of CDs I burned 20-odd years ago, they are getting discoloured now and I can't be bothered to check whether they work yet.

I also keep all my old hard drives, goodness knows whether they will work if I ever fire them up. Basically when I used to upgrade, I'd copy the old stuff to the new (usually much larger) hard drive, then put the old drive away. My current PC has an archive of stuff from about 15-20 years back (XP era anyway).

I was so glad to see the end of 5.25" floppies, they always seemed crap even in the 1980s, but I have a box of the 3.5" ones with probably mainly old drivers and operating systems on. Never see the light of day either.

I worry more about current stuff and whether that will last.

very true about cd/dvd, we burned them thinking we were storing data but never went back to them, and eventually they probably became unreadable anyway

i am amazed when a floppy disc reads after some 30+ years! it does happen but not often

the media seems so precarious

now i tend to store on an external hdd and mix of ssd (and usb sticks!) on the basis that if its stored at least twice then i have a good chance of saving it if something goes wrong

the scale of it now is enormous too, more than i would ever have tried to handle with optical or hdds of 20 years back

if our old hoards aren't surviving then i wonder how long any of it will survive, even if we try copying to new media every few years

I never trusted the internet, seems wise with company's killing off their old archives in the past few years.

I Still have all my old CD-R's sitting in my parents garage last 20 years.
Most seem to still work on the occasions I get some out to run up an old PC when visiting them.

Few years ago I found my "Data" HDD from the same time period which had a few NO-CD patches, my old savegames, and a few other things I either couldn't find anywhere or were better than the alternatives I had since gotten.

Main thing I'm nervous about is my photos, they live on a few different hard drives but no where online anymore so if the house burns down then that's all the photos gone.

I used to have a bunch of CD-Rs from 10+ years back. However I sadly threw most of them away because I didn't care about preservation until I started growing up. However I've been building up an archive of what I had left (from spare CDs/HDDs/SD/Cloud/etc) throughout the past several years. While most of the content like games and other media I could attempt to get back through the internet, there are some files that are either very rare or just personal things that I shouldn't be uploading.

It does kind of worry me a bit considering that all it takes is a t0rnado tearing my house apart to lose everything.

That or the hard drive gets corrupted, I had an external HDD enclosure powering on and off during my transfers corrupting many of my gameplay recordings. 🙁

Yes, a lot of it is still around on the web, but I'm not the "super trusting" type!

Years ago I began with a 1TB drives (which has grown to a few 4TB drives), and started saving
"everything": .ISO's of install/driver CD/DVDs, published driver archives for most every system I
had along they way, audio files, and lot of other system related "stuff".

There's even a drive with backups of most of my own creations several times a year.
(and I've kept it "all the way back")

I've been more lax since I retired, but over the years I would keep two copies of each
drive, adding-to/updating one, and from time to time copying the newer one over the
old one (which then became the one to update) - this both kept a redundant backup of
most of the data and exercised/rewrote each drive from time to time).
I didn't ever "lose" anything I have so saved!

The really important stuff (to me) which would be mainly my own software and
some critical third party drives and applications were kept on a "raid" setup - automatically
having two copies of "the latest" - IIRC once in all those years, one of the raid drives
failed but I was able to replace it and rebuild the raid - again nothing lost!

(I've also got several 100-stacks of DVDs of backups/copies I made before I worked
out the swap-drive system)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

chinny22 wrote on 2024-09-17, 01:57:

Main thing I'm nervous about is my photos, they live on a few different hard drives but no where online anymore so if the house burns down then that's all the photos gone.

THEBaratusII wrote on 2024-09-17, 02:12:

It does kind of worry me a bit considering that all it takes is a t0rnado tearing my house apart to lose everything.

that is a worry, even if we had redundancy if its physically in one location its sharing the same risks like damp, fire etc

i never separated my old CDs etc, but i should with new backups - i guess that why cloud is used, on the basis that the days after a local calamity the internet would still be up. otherwise it would be about putting a storage device in a relatives home or something

DaveDDS wrote on 2024-09-17, 03:23:

Yes, a lot of it is still around on the web, but I'm not the "super trusting" type! […]
Show full quote

Yes, a lot of it is still around on the web, but I'm not the "super trusting" type!

Years ago I began with a 1TB drives (which has grown to a few 4TB drives), and started saving
"everything": .ISO's of install/driver CD/DVDs, published driver archives for most every system I
had along they way, audio files, and lot of other system related "stuff".

There's even a drive with backups of most of my own creations several times a year.
(and I've kept it "all the way back")

I've been more lax since I retired, but over the years I would keep two copies of each
drive, adding-to/updating one, and from time to time copying the newer one over the
old one (which then became the one to update) - this both kept a redundant backup of
most of the data and exercised/rewrote each drive from time to time).
I didn't ever "lose" anything I have so saved!

The really important stuff (to me) which would be mainly my own software and
some critical third party drives and applications were kept on a "raid" setup - automatically
having two copies of "the latest" - IIRC once in all those years, one of the raid drives
failed but I was able to replace it and rebuild the raid - again nothing lost!

(I've also got several 100-stacks of DVDs of backups/copies I made before I worked
out the swap-drive system)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

that's a lot, and the approach is safe - though i guess physical location matters

i realise that i have so many data that i am unlikely now to ever use much of it - i mean even as a backup should a main copy be lost. there are games that will never be played, pdfs never to be referenced and so forth. As it turned out that was also true 20+ years ago with a few meagre CDs

gerry wrote on 2024-09-17, 12:35:

that's a lot, and the approach is safe - though i guess physical location matters

To address the risk of "what if something happens to here (where I store the drives)...

When I ran my company, the inactive set of drives lived in a bank safety deposit box.
Even now I tend to keep backup copies of the most important drives with a friend place.

gerry wrote on 2024-09-17, 12:35:

i realise that i have so many data that i am unlikely now to ever use much of it - i mean even as a backup should a main copy be lost. there are games that will never be played, pdfs never to be referenced and so forth. As it turned out that was also true 20+ years ago with a few meagre CDs

I always took the approach/attitude that the cost of a few drives paled in comparison to
what it would cost me if I ever lost the data (not just $$ but time/effort as well)

.. and I've rarely used it, much less "needed" it - but the cost always seemed insignificant to me.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

I'd say I frequently re-reference my old burned CD-Rs, especially now that retro PCs have become more of a "thing". Sure I have moved most of my stuff to flash drives and HDDs, so I can often get it quicker from these. But for bootable CDs (OSes, utilities, etc.), I still prefer to use those over USB drives, unless I'm on a very new machine that just doesn't have one (most of my PCs do, though.) I also found out that many of my newer "no-name" flash drives can't / shouldn't be trusted. Found several now that are corrupting data bits here and there. Most recently (a few months back) it was a text file that had a bunch of CD keys for a game. Tried to open it and it gave me garbled text - thanks shitty flash media! Found the CD with the same file from 20 years ago in my drawer, opened the file from the CD, and presto - keys are all there! The only flash drives that seem to still be doing OK with long term storage are my 4 GB and smaller ones. My 512 MB SanDisk Cruzer from 2005 still has files from back then that are fine and hash exactly like the other backups I have on various HDDs.

Also, several years ago (or maybe it was a little more), I couldn't find a specific old version of WinAmp anywhere on the internet. Not sure if Google/DuckDuckGo were trolling me or if it was for real, but there really wasn't a single copy anywhere. So I went back to my CDs, as I knew I had one on there, and found it right away... dare I say even quicker than looking through the silly search results that Google was giving me.
Moreover, in the case of particular modded files for some games (namely, Counter-Strike and Half-Life custom maps, along with add-on cars & tracks for NFS HS), looking for those specific files on the internet again would take me ages. Keeping them on a flash drive also doesn't make sense, since I use them too infrequently. So it really is best that they are on CDs that I know exactly where I have them.

Now here's what I found pretty funny when browsing through my old CDs. One of them had backup of my "naughty" pictures collection (I was a teenager back then... so what more can I say. 🤣 ) Didn't really care to look initially, but then curiosity/nostalgia (and late night boredom/laziness?) got the better part of me, so I decided why the heck not. And I have to say it was totally amusing! In particular, it was very obvious which stereotype of women I was into back then, which I thought was quite funny. Then something else dawned on me: what do the "models" from those pictures even look like today? (Now nearly 20 years later.) Most of them appeared to be in their 20's and 30's in the photos, save for the rare 18 YO here and there. I can't imagine any of them aged well from all the plastic surgeries and implants. I know I haven't aged that badly... and even then, one transformation I've gone through is that my hair went from super-thick and hard-to-cut back then to not-quite bald, but getting there now. 🤣
So all in all, it was just an interesting realization when I viewed these old pictures.
Should probably get rid of that CD... but sadly it's mixed with other data (no CD patches, old softwares, game mods and files, and etc.)

*EDIT*
BTW, I forgot to say that now I've also started hoarding other people's data from abandoned / thrown away CDs. Yes, I know it's a "creep" thing to do, but not like anything will ever come out of it.
It mostly started with me picking up various thrown away / abandoned CDs and DVDs off the ground at the regular flea market place I go to on the weekends. I do it mostly to help reduce the trash left on the ground after the event is over. And I've also found quite a few interesting things this way: an original CD set of Monkey Island, Need For Speed SE, Half-Life (burned CD, but whatever), various movies and shows, blank CD-Rs and DVDs... even some CD-RWs and DVD-RW's! Of course, those are far and few in between. Most of the stuff is pirated movies, which I don't particularly care for at all. And among all of that are also people's picture and video backups... so yeah, talk about hoarding data. 🤣

gerry wrote on 2024-09-16, 13:49:

very true about cd/dvd, we burned them thinking we were storing data but never went back to them, and eventually they probably became unreadable anyway

Well, I can't say that applies about me / my backup CDs (yes, I said CDs, as that's what I solely used back then. I didn't get to burning DVDs until maybe 10-ish years ago.)
All of my CD-Rs from back then (mid 2000's is when I got my 1st CD burner... 2004 or 2005 to be exact) still read 100% perfect. Then again, turns out the 100-pack of TDK CD-Rs that someone bought in our house are Tayo Yudens... so no surprise they are still good. I was also quite paranoid about making coaster CDs back then (and I did make quite a few as I was trying out different softwares until I found something that actually worked OK.) As such, I only burned everything at 4x at max. "Important stuff" were burned at 2x! And all of the burned CDs were stored in either cases or those CD organizers and kept in a dark place (inside my desk.) So no surprise they are still 100% readable.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-09-17, 01:57:

Main thing I'm nervous about is my photos, they live on a few different hard drives but no where online anymore so if the house burns down then that's all the photos gone.

Should gather them all up on one HDD (or two) and keep them in a different location.

Many years back, before "retro PCs" were even cool, I specifically build an old Pentium II PC (which used to be my family's old PC) at my grandmother's house for this purpose. When I'd go visit her every summer, I would also bring a combo of flash drives, CDs, and maybe the odd HDD to append to / update the data on that backup PC. The PII PC eventually got upgraded to a P3 and I moved everything onto there too. I used to be quite proactive about keeping my backups on there up until 2-3 years ago. The last 2-3 years, though, I've been slacking quite a bit with this... and not only - even my main PCs have turned quite messy, which is very a-typical for me. Back in the days of small HDDs (and having to burn stuff to CDs to make sure I don't run out of HDD space), I used to run a very tight ship on my HDD on my main PC. Then, over the years, as I started finding free/abandoned PCs with HDDs and also cheap 2nd hand HDDs, that's when I started slacking a little more.

So on a related note, one thing I have to say that I appreciate about having smaller HDDs back in the days is that it forced me to be more organized. Now I've gotten lazy & spoiled.
On the very rare occasion anymore, and this is indeed very rare, I do sit down, put some music on, and tidy up what I can. But the problem anymore is that I have one too many computers that I use on a daily basis. So keeping all of them organized and looking the same has become more difficult. Also, I can't ever go without saying this, but ever since Windows Vista/7, things have become even more difficult for file organization. Not sure why MS had to f- with Explorer UI so much for Vista/7, but it's so much worse (one word here: Libraries). This is one main reason why I still can't replace XP.

I had a lot of burned discs from many years ago, I spent a weekend copying all the data onto my TV computer and shredding them a while back.

momaka wrote on 2024-09-19, 02:42:

I'd say I frequently re-reference my old burned CD-Rs, especially now that retro PCs have become more of a "thing". Sure I have moved most of my stuff to flash drives and HDDs, so I can often get it quicker from these. But for bootable CDs (OSes, utilities, etc.), I still prefer to use those over USB drives, unless I'm on a very new machine that just doesn't have one (most of my PCs do, though.) I also found out that many of my newer "no-name" flash drives can't / shouldn't be trusted. Found several now that are corrupting data bits here and there. Most recently (a few months back) it was a text file that had a bunch of CD keys for a game. Tried to open it and it gave me garbled text - thanks shitty flash media! Found the CD with the same file from 20 years ago in my drawer, opened the file from the CD, and presto - keys are all there! The only flash drives that seem to still be doing OK with long term storage are my 4 GB and smaller ones. My 512 MB SanDisk Cruzer from 2005 still has files from back then that are fine and hash exactly like the other backups I have on various HDDs.

Also, several years ago (or maybe it was a little more), I couldn't find a specific old version of WinAmp anywhere on the internet. Not sure if Google/DuckDuckGo were trolling me or if it was for real, but there really wasn't a single copy anywhere. So I went back to my CDs, as I knew I had one on there, and found it right away... dare I say even quicker than looking through the silly search results that Google was giving me.
Moreover, in the case of particular modded files for some games (namely, Counter-Strike and Half-Life custom maps, along with add-on cars & tracks for NFS HS), looking for those specific files on the internet again would take me ages. Keeping them on a flash drive also doesn't make sense, since I use them too infrequently. So it really is best that they are on CDs that I know exactly where I have them.

that's a good example where vintage data hoards prove useful; old applications, saves and mod that either are either personal or no longer online. As DaveDDS said above, its a low cost means to insuring against loss

I have found the same with flash drives - old, smaller, ones last longer. I guess that might be because they were relatively more expensive and 'high end' early on, and are now mass produced with lower quality standards. the worst, in my experience, are the 'free' corporate give away ones.

BTW, I forgot to say that now I've also started hoarding other people's data from abandoned / thrown away CDs. Yes, I know it's a "creep" thing to do, but not like anything will ever come out of it.
It mostly started with me picking up various thrown away / abandoned CDs and DVDs off the ground at the regular flea market place I go to on the weekends. I do it mostly to help reduce the trash left on the ground after the event is over. And I've also found quite a few interesting things this way: an original CD set of Monkey Island, Need For Speed SE, Half-Life (burned CD, but whatever), various movies and shows, blank CD-Rs and DVDs... even some CD-RWs and DVD-RW's! Of course, those are far and few in between. Most of the stuff is pirated movies, which I don't particularly care for at all. And among all of that are also people's picture and video backups... so yeah, talk about hoarding data. 🤣

i dont think its creepy as such, but kind of interesting in the sense of getting surprise data - like the games you got this way
[

So on a related note, one thing I have to say that I appreciate about having smaller HDDs back in the days is that it forced me to be more organized. Now I've gotten lazy & spoiled.

that's true! its faster to simply copy whole folders over at a time than to filter through them, the cost appears when searching for something.

pete8475 wrote on 2024-09-19, 02:47:

I had a lot of burned discs from many years ago, I spent a weekend copying all the data onto my TV computer and shredding them a while back.

I would probably have kept the CDs too, just in case... 😀

I started downloading in the 90s and I still have the lot of hard disk.

gerry wrote on 2024-09-19, 10:48:

I did! Most of the disks were in binders or on spindles though.

My late father used to make me burn CD-R's (and later CD-RW's) with the ZIP files I kept getting from File Planet and the like; because even after I extracted whatever to whatever I kept the original ZIP file downloaded anyways.

I still have all the discs but they're probably not readable anymore due to years having gone by and burned CDs deteriorate more than badly pressed CD-ROMs. Though I vaguely remember trying to read some of them and evidently running into a roadblock because of the software we used back then evidently didn't just write a standard ISO like file system but some weird proprietary Roxio Disc Creator thing? No idea now since I don't have a suitable optical drive anymore.

20 years ago I probably would have already had Standard Def Server Rev A set up. It would've been a pretty modest file server/firewall type of thing back then. Basically a headless PIII-500 desktop with a big hard drive in it. Before I had the server, I used Zip discs to back up important stuff (which I can totally laugh about now) and CD-Rs for everything else. I no longer have any of my old Zips/CDs, and Standard Def Server, now in its 8th iteration, has become more powerful than I could have possibly imagined.

A floppy disk based data hoard I do have is one that was actually given to me by a good neighbor--one who happened to be a real Apple II head back in the day. A few years ago when he discovered that I had a couple of Apple IIs in my basement, he gave me a big box of 5.25" disks chock-full of neat software. And the super-mega-awesome part is that he wrote a good chunk of that software! Lots of "text adventures" (well, more like choose-your-own-adventure electronic books he had written for his children back in the day) and we had an absolute blast checking them out. The guy really was a talented writer!

I've made it a bit of a tradition to go downstairs with a big cup of hot cocoa on chilly autumn and winter nights, rev up the Disk II, and just get lost in the wonderful, sometimes downright silly world concocted by none other than the gentleman next door.

I had mentioned to him that I'd love to upload his masterpieces to archive.org, an idea he was quite enthusiastic about. So one of these days when I have the time I'll try and do exactly that. The cooler evenings are right around the corner!

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2024-09-21, 19:16:

I had mentioned to him that I'd love to upload his masterpieces to archive.org, an idea he was quite enthusiastic about. So one of these days when I have the time I'll try and do exactly that. The cooler evenings are right around the corner!

Looking forward to that day when you upload those Apple II treasures! Please keep us in the loop. For I'm sure there are many dozens (hundreds, even) who appreciate your effots at preservation.

I proudly still have my Apple II and it still works very well 40+ years on. Having some "new" retro software for it will be a very welcomed thing.

Will do!

The IIs are absolute troopers aren't they? Replace their RIFA caps, perhaps give them a couple of new memory chips to munch on when they start acting foggy, and they just keep on truckin!

A couple of years ago I decided to rip all my CD's, CDR's and DVD-R's to iso's and put them on my server as a backup. Good job I did too as there were a few that were starting to have failed sector reads. Fortunately most of those were duplicates (another months Win98 MSDN install CD) or I could still read and copy off most of the content.

Going through them threw up some right treasures that I'd forgotton I had. There's a lot of coding information and source code dating from the early/mid-90's to ~2005. An awful lot of warez... I had no idea I had so many copies of different 3DS Max versions for example! Lot's of drivers, game demos, patches and no-cd's, and of course full games too.

I do plan to go through it all, de-duplicate and make much of it it available on my web server but just haven't gotten that far yet.