do you still use optical drives?

[excitedbox]

I use to Optical Pickup Unit out of them. I haven`t used a CD or DVD in years until one day I needed to use one and didn´t have any computer with a optical drive around.

[BravoV]

My Taiyo Yuden's discs are still really good, happened to retrieve from my dry box to get some old files, and passed quality scans on BenQ dvd drive just few months ago.

Most of my archives on discs were protected with QuickPar.

[legacy]

WO MOs are called "WORM", with the meaning of "write once, read many" WO-RM

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Magneto-optical media was the best for long term data storage.

These MOs? I would not call them "reliable"!



The optics get cloudy with time. Back in the day I made lots of $ fixing those... And it's a mess to get into to clean them properly. Expensive, slow and unreliable IMO.

[MyHeadHz]

Yes, but maybe not in the traditional sense.  Blu-rays are only on disk, which is annoying.  There simply is not another common media solution for HD video.  They are also a pain to deal with, so I immediately rip them and keep the originals only as backups.  I have mixed feelings about it.  If they were less of a pain to deal with, I'd probably end up spending a lot more on them...

I also have physical CD's for much of my music.  As with blu-rays, they are ripped and only used for backups.  I always keep burned boot disks handy for various distros, though flash media has mostly replaced those.

[Halcyon]

For the most part, most users probably wouldn't really bother, but I use them perhaps once or twice a month.

I had an old machine which despite supporting booting from USB devices in the BIOS just didn't seem to like booting off the ones I created, so I had to use Plop on a burnt CD.

[rdl]

I still have one optical disk drive in use. Mostly for ripping music CDs and I have some DVD movies that haven't been ripped yet.

Just being a bit nit-picky, Blu-ray is only on disc because Blu-ray is an optical disc storage format. No disc, no Blu-ray.

[legacy]

The optics get cloudy with time. Back in the day I made lots of $ fixing those... And it's a mess to get into to clean them properly. Expensive, slow and unreliable IMO.

What about DVDRams?

[chickenHeadKnob]

I have a collection of dvd-RW and write once I haven't touched in years. Last time I looked they were giving me errors so I assume they are all trash now. Which leads me to the question: The only DVD  I now use is an official Microsoft Win 7 Pro stamped DVD  that I occasionally use to make a Win 7  virtual machine image when setting up a new computer. Do these also develop bit rot? It is by now a really old disk that I wasn't expecting to be in use for so many years. As I don't want Win 10 even as a virtual machine I need a copy of this on something with archival reliability.

[Veteran68]

I have a collection of dvd-RW and write once I haven't touched in years. Last time I looked they were giving me errors so I assume they are all trash now. Which leads me to the question: The only DVD  I now use is an official Microsoft Win 7 Pro stamped DVD  that I occasionally use to make a Win 7  virtual machine image when setting up a new computer. Do these also develop bit rot? It is by now a really old disk that I wasn't expecting to be in use for so many years. As I don't want Win 10 even as a virtual machine I need a copy of this on something with archival reliability.

No. Pressed discs are stamped through an aluminum or other metallic substrate, so it's pretty rugged and should last longer than you more likely. R/RW media use a dye which is pitted by the laser and the dye degrades over time, especially with exposure to light.

[david77]

Haven't used a CD/DVD in years. I've never found the RW stuff reliable enough, my backups are on HDD's and on DLT tapes.

Fixed my audio CD Player some time ago but had to go and borrow a CD to try if it works, I've ripped & then trashed them all.

[Rerouter]

I have come across more dead burnt disks than dead USB sticks, only a week back found a box of 256MB-4GB USB sticks from my school days, no used in almost 10 years,

So I hook them up and run sector tests on them for corruption,
Out of 14 drives, only 2 had suffered small scale corruption (few blocks each)

So USB's can be reliable if left alone in a cool and dry place. not as a primary backup, but not back for a secondary,

Also found a 2012 256GB SSD stored around 2013, that had an entire flash page corrupt, but everything else was intact, and the affected area was 8MB

The long haul ones are hard drives, if looked after, they hold data for stupid amounts of time

As for the actual question, I have a USB DVD drive i pull out when I need to burn an OS install disk or movie, or read in some old driver disk for old hardware, most of my media is digital these days,

[David Hess]

I have come across more dead burnt disks than dead USB sticks, only a week back found a box of 256MB-4GB USB sticks from my school days, no used in almost 10 years,

So I hook them up and run sector tests on them for corruption,
Out of 14 drives, only 2 had suffered small scale corruption (few blocks each)

So USB's can be reliable if left alone in a cool and dry place. not as a primary backup, but not back for a secondary,

Older Flash memory uses a larger geometry process and fewer levels resulting in much longer retention time and more program and erase cycles.  At the extreme, 55 nanometer and larger NOR Flash will last decades and can support a million program and erase cycles.

[coppercone2]

what do you recommend in terms of long term flash? brand, flash drive size, etc?

[BravoV]

what do you recommend in terms of long term flash? brand, flash drive size, etc?

As you don't define long term means, I took a liberty to propose you -> Glass Drive 

.. they claimed can store data for up to 13.8 billion years. 




-> This Tiny Glass Disc Can Store 360TB of Data For 13.8 Billion Years

[coppercone2]

what do you recommend in terms of long term flash? brand, flash drive size, etc?

As you don't define long term means, I took a liberty to propose you -> Glass Drive 

.. they claimed can store data for up to 13.8 billion years. 




-> This Tiny Glass Disc Can Store 360TB of Data For 13.8 Billion Years

nah I just meant the thing david hess was talking about, thats too much.

[David Hess]

what do you recommend in terms of long term flash? brand, flash drive size, etc?

If I had a good answer, I would be using it.  I am still looking for a reliable USB drive.  SSDs are less of a problem if you assume they are continuously powered and benefit from read and idle time scrubbing.

The only criteria you can really look for is Flash memory which is SLC (single level cell) but it costs a lot more.  Transcend sells some.  Swissbit might be another good option.

[Towger]

I backup important work data to DVD once a year.  Why, because they are immune from an EMP.  If an event occurred and a working computer could not be obtained afterwards, then restoring the data would be the least of my worries.  Otherwise, all other backups are currently to hard drives.

[Rick Law]

I backup important work data to DVD once a year.  Why, because they are immune from an EMP.  If an event occurred and a working computer could not be obtained afterwards, then restoring the data would be the least of my worries.  Otherwise, all other backups are currently to hard drives.

Same here - not for EMP but durability.  I don't know how many times I have dropped my tax folders.  In my tax folder, besides printed stuff, there are scans of documents filed and unused in case I am audited.  I am 99.999% certain that the CD's inside the folder was not harmed by the 2 feet drop.  Whereas, if it had been a hard drive...

SD's and flash would survive the drop just the same, but I have more confidence with CD's in retaining the data.

I would love to see optical discs having TB range storage at the same CD size format, but I am not holding my breath for them.

[David Hess]

Even if TB level capacity were available in optical media, it would take an impractical time to write.  The closest thing which is suitable for archival use is 100GB M-Disc Blu-ray media which I guess takes 1.5 hours to write at x4?

[coppercone2]

I backup important work data to DVD once a year.  Why, because they are immune from an EMP.  If an event occurred and a working computer could not be obtained afterwards, then restoring the data would be the least of my worries.  Otherwise, all other backups are currently to hard drives.

Same here - not for EMP but durability.  I don't know how many times I have dropped my tax folders.  In my tax folder, besides printed stuff, there are scans of documents filed and unused in case I am audited.  I am 99.999% certain that the CD's inside the folder was not harmed by the 2 feet drop.  Whereas, if it had been a hard drive...

SD's and flash would survive the drop just the same, but I have more confidence with CD's in retaining the data.

I would love to see optical discs having TB range storage at the same CD size format, but I am not holding my breath for them.

good idea to protect the one thing the government does care about after EMP lol