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Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Use Optical Media?
The other day at an event, public relation officials were handing out press kit (it usually contains everything the company announced, photos from the event, and contact information of the company) to journalists. When I reached office and opened the kit, I found a CD in it. Which was weird because it's been two to three years since I had a computer with an optical drive. And all these years I didn't need one. Which brings up the question: Does your work require dealing with CDs and DVDs anymore? An anonymous reader asks the same question: I still use optical discs for various backup purposes, but recently I developed doubts as to the reliability of the media to last a reasonable amount of time. I have read a review on Amazon of the TDK DVDs, in which somebody described losing 8000 (sic!) DVDs of data after 4 years of storage. I promptly canceled my purchase of TDKs. So, do you still use opticals for back-up -- Blu-Rays, DVDs, CDs? -- and if so, how do you go about it?I do buy Blu-Ray discs of movies, though. So my life isn't optical disc free yet. What about yours?
Archival grade Blu-ray is great for backups, but that's about it. I don't even bother with that any more, just encrypt and upload off site.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I still keep optical drives on all of my machines. Not only do I need to rip CDs on occasion, but I like the durability of optical media. It can be filed away just about anywhere, resists moisture and static, and is a great cheap way to pass information on to others. I wish the recycling options were better.
Alternative Right.
I can't remember the last time I used a CD or DVD. Never used Bluray.
Oh wait, no. I can remember the last time I tried to use a CD; it was the install media for some software that I'd purchased a few years ago. I couldn't install it, the CD had developed a defect. I'm not sure that counts as 'The last time I USED optical media' because I didn't actually get to USE it.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I still get round to ripping old DVDs, and very very occasionally old CDs, that I pick up in second hand shops. I've not loaded a data CD for years.
I'd be loath to get rid of my optical drive from my hulking great tower PC though. Partly because I have some old backup media that I want to be able to read again one day. (Yes I know I could move it to disk / cloud / whatever and that the CDs are probably degraded already).
But mainly, a bit like getting hand written letters, I'm sort of hoping for the day I get to open a nice jewel case, pop the unscratched new disk in, and wait in anticipation while it spins up. Nostalgia.
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All of our computers at work (six of them, small office) are optical media free. We do have a USB DVD drive for the once-every-few-months we need to read or burn optical media. At home I have a DVD drive, but only because my computer is 5+ years old. If I was building a new computer for home use now I'd leave it out.
Be glad it ain't one of those
Yeah, there's still a place for good ol' optical media.
... as coasters
I haven't had a computer in at least 4 years that has an optical drive. There is no need for this technology anymore.
Cheapest way to rent a movie that I know of, even considering online options.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I work for a law firm. We need to send data out all the time. When possible we FTP it. But for many jobs we need permanent record, so we use a mix of DVD's and hard drives.
For large jobs, we use Hard Drives. Anything less than 10 GB, we burn DVDs. We do it all the time.
Also, while I don't buy laptops or tablets with DVD players, I insist on every Desktop computer I buy to have one.
I will do so just for the ability to play my old movies and TV shows.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I still use optical media to ensure clean install of various OS, because unlike USB, it is much harder to sneak one past checksum when you burn install DVD directly from ISO.
So as a member of a public institution of higher education, Flash drives are up there in the top 3 spots of how data goes missing/copied/stolen along with Email. We have the USB ports disabled except for the 1 or 2 for the Mouse and Keyboard and have those locked to not accept new devices to prevent data from going by the by. I state this because I still use CD/DVD Media for computer deployment under secure conditions where Mass deployment software like SCCM are not practical. Closed systems are the bane of my existence. Also being in user support you have to keep a CD/DVD or 2 around for that one user who will inevitably visit your office with a 6 year old laptop with failing HDD and the USB boot doesn't work and you are forced to recover them via CD/DVD.
Creating a bootable USB stick under Windows is a hit-and-miss affair. I just find it easier to pop in a blank disc, burn the Linux ISO to the disc, and boot off of that.
I just bought a used pair of CD players for 250 bucks a pop.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I find optical media useful for transferring information to/from systems on which I've disallowed USB and network access. -PCP
I import PS3 and PS4 games from Japan, instead of buying digitally. Yes I still use optical media.
I ripped all my old CDs and DVDs a long time ago. I built a new PC this year after not having done so in 10 years and didn't buy an optical drive for it.
Begging the question is NOT "Brings up the question". It is assuming a question that is not asked and assuming it to be true.
See:
http://www.nizkor.org/features...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.logicallyfallaciou...
Which brings up the question of why /. editors didn't fix that :)
Ehud
I can't remember how long it's been since I used a physical disc. Any software installations I do at work or home are all from ISO images. At home all the media is in MKV, we don't even have a dedicated optical disc device connect. The only one running would be our XBOX360 and that is because it comes with an optical drive. Even for that we use an XK3Y and external hard disk full of game ISOs.
Maybe not for work, but I buy and listen to CDs, I burn CDs/DVDs for myself and others, pull information off of archival CDs and DVDs, pick up Blurays of movies I really like.
You name it, pretty much.
I understand that optical media's use is declining, and that makes sense for a lot of reasons, but there are still uses for it today. It seems that some folks are eager for it to die, for some reason.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I back up all my data onto 4.7 GB Truecrypt volumes and burn them to DVD and put them into my safe.
I think DVD is more resistant to EMP than Blu-Ray.
I have a BD-RE drive in my home desktop. It doesn't get much use, to be honest, but I'm not quite ready to make the jump away from having an optical drive just yet.
I've got a bunch of old backups still on optical discs; everything from CD-Rs to Blu-Rays. Admittedly, this is only low priority "nice to have" stuff. Anything it would actually hurt me if I lost (which is only a couple of hundred megs of data when I get right down to it) is backed up by other, more reliable methods.
I do still have a handful of games on disc that I never bought . Some of these I'm clearly never going to play again and could easily throw out, but there are a couple, such as Warcraft 3, that I'd still like the option to play from time to time.
I will (very occasionally) watch a DVD or Blu-Ray movie on my PC rather than TV. This is particularly true in the summer months; my living room, where the TV lives, can get brutally hot, while my study, where the desktop lives, is cool and shady.
In addition to the above, while boot-from-USB is a lot more reliable than it used to be, I've still had more issues with it than boot-from-optical-disc. So I still like to have an optical drive for those occasions when I need to boot from external media.
I recently had to install an HPE Server firmware update which was supplied a 5.8GB iso image and had to be burnt to dual layer DVD for installation.
So yeah, still in use.
No, last desktop compute I bought I didn't even bother to look for dvd/br drive. I think dvd/br consume too much space and are more expensive than some hard drives.
Self-burned optical disks are crap for data archival. It's pure lottery whether or not you can read them in a few years, even the "good" brands. For movies and music, it doesn't matter so much if you have a few glitches on the disc. For data backups, it matters a lot.
I only use optical media for short-term data transfer, like handing big files to our local print shop. For me, data archival means spinning rust.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This is pretty common for medical records too. When the hospital gives you results of cancer screening/X-Rays, it's often a bunch of files or images/videos on a DVD
... more cost effective than optical media. In terms of dollars per GB/TB hard drives surpassed optical a long time ago, and the reality is hard drives are so cheap relative to optical media you can simply buy one hard drive per year and come out ahead then if you used optical media.
All the time, as disposable media. Give some data to someone, don't care if you get the disc back.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I use Bluray's for backing up my family photos/video and to address the reliability worries I use DVDisaster which address extra ECC information making it more resistant to degradation.
Using cds/dvds to archive works... if you do it properly.
This includes only buying quality media that's known to last (not cheap Chinese unlabeled crap).
You also have to store it in temperature and humidity regulated storage (i.e. not in car or storage unit in 120 degree California weather).
You also need to keep duplicates. If you don't have duplicates, then any loss of a single dvd is a total lose of that data.
And probably best to verify them occasionally just like all backup setups.
On the internet there's documents of standards and how to do this and what the guidelines are.
Optical and tapes are probably the best long term solutions right now, especially when used offsite.
Hard drives in home NAS setups are probably best to keep it live.
USB sticks have been effectively banned on DoD networks. We regularly use CD/DVD media to burn software and patches to then transfer it to the classified networks. The optical drives on the high side are almost always read-only to avoid issues with transport of classified off the servers.
These days it's even hard to find a working optical drive for me. So, no.
Backups go to USB drives (optical's capacity is too limited anyway and transfer rates suck badly).
Audio CDs: not used in many years, I think I have one working player. Using mostly streaming, MP3s rarely.
DVD: all my drives are broken. On Netflix now.
Bluray: never bought into it. Got obsoleted by streaming before it could really take off.
I have a DVD+RW drive in case I need optical media, but I haven't used it since installing the OS on the system years ago. Even then, I would have used a USB flash drive if I hadn't lost it shortly beforehand.
The network has gotten faster in the last 10-20 years, and optical media really hasn't. I can copy encrypted data over my internet connection faster than I can burn it to disc.
Hard disk capacity has grown to the point where everything will fit for most users, so there is no need to dump audio/video/apps when space runs out. USB hard drives offer greater capacity and speed. Disk is more available than ever, which makes optical media increasingly pointless.
Optical media is basically for people who want archival backups, or as a last resort for transferring data.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
for personal use, I still access many of my generic "CompUSA" branded CDRs from 1997 that read just fine and I have many others from different manufacturers that are still working fine.
At work, I create several CDs per week and I've never encountered problems with them after 4+years of use.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
You can buy permanent DVD/Bluray disks now that last more than 1000+ years.
https://www.amazon.com/M-DISC-4-7GB-Permanent-Archival-Backup/dp/B007OV5IZ0
I'll be burning an Ophcrack live CD when I run home at lunch. The site is blocked on our proxy server, and the guest wireless will take 17 hours to download the 400MB and change ISO. Instead, I'll just download it at home and burn it. Should take all of five minutes.
I burn copies of my movies for my girlfriend all the time, and the occasional audio CD for our cars as well. I always drop the extra $40 or whatever for two burners when I build a new machine.
I don't use it for backup, I use two MyBooks that I rotate - one home, one off-site.
I still buy music in CD. I don't buy much music, I'd say 95% is classical. I also have ripped around 95% of all my music into 312lkbps MP3.
For video, I stream / netflix snailmail as a means to screen before i buy it. If I like it I buy it, and on Blu-Ray if possible.
I have a 7-foot screen on the horizontal and fairly decent projection, sound and room. I have a pretty good blu-ray player. It's still my primary source. (Oppo BD-103, for the curious). Presentation matters.
I like my shelves full of books, CDs and bluray/dvd. I also like the convenience of media-less formats. Why not have both?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Encrypting your data and giving it to Google Nearline or Amazon Glacier to store is cheaper than just about anything else even before considering the value of your time. Plus when your house burns down you still have your data.
I unplugged the optical drive that came with my system because i needed the SATA port to add an SSD.
Havent missed it once.
Ransomware and other stuff can't touch my DVD-DLs.
We use optical media every week as a recording medium in a house of worship. We've found that recording to a CD has a lower noise floor and better reliability than recording into a laptop. If the power fails during CD recording, the audio up to the point of the power failure is recoverable. If there's a problem with a PC on the other hand (lock-up, application crash, etc.) the entire recording is just gone, and transient loads (search indexer, Windows Update) can make the recording skip.
We don't use the CDs for archival, however. As soon as the recording is complete we rip it into a PC.
We make large industrial equipment and we still send the manual and print pack on a CD with the machine. The customer can buy hard copies of the same materials and we have sent the materials out on thumb drives but standard practice is to send a CD. I think that the old idea "no one ever reads the manual" is the reason we have not changed this practice and we have a shitload of CDs.
At work we use them for DBAN and MDT boot media. A group here has to send the government CDRs of records.
At home? I haven't for years. The last time I did was to have a CD in my car because my head unit would sometimes flip out and not play from an iPod or flash drive until the head was reset. Not a massive undertaking but not something I wanted to feel forced to do if I had to go somewhere so I made my own Best of Pat Metheny disc and kept it in the car for such times. I no longer have the head unit or the car and I'm pretty sure the CD ended up going into a trash can.
Because of the shitty deployment of broadband in this country, it's quicker for me to burn major windows updates to a DVD and mail them to my relatives who are still stuck on dial-up using decaying copper wire.
It's much easier to burn a disk image to a DVD than prepare an USB stick as a bootable OS installation media.
Yep, I still wear my glasses, I am not elligible for a corneal surgery.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I back up/image my hard drive regularly using a large-storage, USB, thumb drive with Macrium's Reflect software (I have no relation to them - I like the software); the idea being that the encrypted flash stick can hook to my key chain and be off-site and with me (if I ever need a file while away from home).
Just a few weeks ago, my sister bought a new laptop to replace her decade old laptop, which still works, but struggles to keep up with today's web. (Why?! Grrr...) I think she inadvertently got one without an optical drive. Anyway, she called me for advice on setting it up and asked about which office suite to use. 'I still have MS Office 2003 on CD-ROM, should I just use that?', she said. I reminded her of her purchase, which elicited a "D'oh!"
This week I finally managed to find my backups from 2001 on CD(s), and a few DVD backups. All of the them seems to be in perfect state. Planning to buy blueray writer to move to next level of backups at home.
Every once in a while I run into an old laptop that will not boot from USB, so I am forced to burn a CD or DVD of Linux to get it into "working good enough to use" territory.
My car can play MP3 CD's so maybe 1 or 2 times a year I will fill up a CD with random music from my collection and listen to those when the mood strikes me.
I used to back up my movies for my kids and grand kids to DVD-R or +R so I could keep the originals in working order... but with the advent of streaming from Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Youtube, I don't even bother with that anymore.
I probably have like 20-30 blank CD's left and probably about the same number of blank DVD's. Should last me a few years before I make the decision to retire optical media or keep it around for the really obscure time I want to burn a disk.
If someone lost 8000 DVDs they did something wrong. Either buying really cheap media or storing it improperly. I have DVDs that I burned from ten years ago that still work fine. I recently moved a few hundred DVDs over to BluRay for the reduced storage space and only had a few files that I had issues recovering. The rest came across with no problem and that was with a mix of Verbatim (good quality) and Sony (not quite so good quality) media.
Is optical media more robust than hard drives if there is an intense EMP event? Optical is more robust in floods, and arguably more shock resistant.
And.. A few years ago a change to the linux kernel broke optical drive burning support for T61 laptops. Huge bummer.
Subject says it all.
Unless someone starts producing USB flash drives that have a hardware write protect switch that can't be countermanded by software, there is, in my opinion, still a need for optical media. Otherwise there is no way to truly protect your data from being altered or deleted by bad actors. The polar opposite woudl be cloud storage, which is about as 'volatile' as you can get; companies offering cloud storage could suddenly go out of business and screw you out of your data, or if they're being bad actors, futz with your data or delete it. There has been more than one news story over the years of people's digital purchases either being altered or deleted, even though they were stored on their local machines, because of either conscious decision or error on the part of the IP owners and their DRM. Recently there was even a case of a songwriter/musicians' own personal works being deleted by iTunes, even though iTunes/Apple had absolutely NO rights whatsoever to the content that was deleted! Nope, there is still a need for some sort of write-once-read-many storage medium, or something that can be made read-only on demand in a way that can't be overridden. Even removable semiconductor or rotating storage is still read/write, and for all you know the next time you plug it in, something will get deleted by some DRM action or malware.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Is there a (legal) service that I can ship old audio/video CDs DVDs to and they could just rip it for me in bulk?
My car stereo only takes CD's, so yeah... still using optical media. I rarely ever use DVD's any more; only for archival grade DVD backups (and even those are becoming increasingly rare) and have never even bothered with BD. I own a BD player as an amplifier for my TV because the audio quality was better than a similarly priced home theater system or *spit* "soundbar", but have never tried an actual BD disc.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I expect it to last for the rest of my life, since I've shifted to hard-drive arrays for storage and FTP to exchange files. I've burned 2 DVDs so far this year.
I *buy* all of my movies on dvd/blu-ray, and much of my audio on cds (so I can make high-quality flac rips to stream via dlna around my house).
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. I no longer care if they want to say I merely licensed it--I have it and can do with it as I like.
Also, playing movies off local media means that it *always* works, *never* buffers, and if the connection goes down, or I want to take a laptop and go camping I can still watch or listen to something anywhere I go.
Coupled with a UPS, I watch movies right on through power outages. Try that with netflix/prime/whatever streaming.
The inclusion of an optical DVD writer is the reason we seeked out a refurbished 2011 27" iMac (the last one with an included optical drive) when we recently replaced our computer. We use the DVD drive ALL the time to make .mp3 music disc compilations for the CD player in our 2008 car (yes, we use that instead of an ipod connected to the AUX port, and when you save as .mp3 files) People forget that most recent vehicles with a "CD Player" can also play .mp3 and support menus and folders, so I can put about 8 music CD's worth of music on a single optical disk and play them in the OEM radio in the car. Much more convenient than carrying around a bunch of music CD's or having to plug in an i-pod and fiddle with the controls when driving). And we don't worry about the media getting scratched/lost/"borrowed" we can just burn another one.
Also, we use CD-RW and DVD-RW frequently to burn the latest LINUX distro when we are repurposing older hardware and want to install using the "obsolete" optical drive--much easier than dealing with quirky BIOS and booting from a flash drive or off a network.
Finally, Years ago we purchased a spindle of Kodak "Gold on gold" archive quality CD-R that we keep our pictures and videos on. Haven't failed us yet. When stored as directed in a cool, dry, and dark place , optical media is very reliable.
I buy a lot of older CDs at yard sales to fill in my collections, though others are figuring this out.
- CHEAP.
- No DRM, subscriptions, licensing. These are MINE, all MINE! Bahahahahah!
- Rip them to my music services.
- Save them to both my archives.
- Long-term storage of the discs.
- And it's a cheap way to buy old music. Oh, I mentioned that.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
On my current gaming rig (i7, GTX 980Ti, SSD, etc) I didn't even bother with the optical drive when I built it a few years ago. Yeah, the DVD Burner was only $20 but with USB sticks so cheap I haven't used a optical disk it in a few years. I already have enough old machines with DVD Burners that they are accessible.
I do miss not having an optical drive on my MacBook Pro. I guess it is motivation to finish ripping my Audio CD's to FLAC.
I also miss EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for making perfect rips of my audio CD's. Does anyone know of a replacement on Linux and OSX ?
You can pry my iomega zip drive from my cold, dead hands.
I video plays, variety shows and other presentations put on by the members of our community, and burn the videos to DVD's playable in DVD players, so that the recipients can watch them on TV. I feel badly about using DVD's because the videos are at least 1920x1080 (and 4k capable), so they are dumbed down to 720x480 for the DVD's. But people like to play them in their DVD players and share their activities with their families, so they are very popular. I am planning for the future to switch to Blu-Ray, or even flash drives, but few in my group have Blu-Ray disk players yet. I have a printer which prints an image on the DVD's, so they look very spiffy, though I distribute them at cost. It is a fully volunteer effort. I might add that I use the PowerDirector video editing software which is wonderful for a non-professional, an unpaid plug :).
Optical? Last week I had to recover some files that someone forgot to copy when we stopped to use diskettes. It was complicated to find a machine that still supports 3 1/2 drives. By the way, Maxell diskettes could be read without problems even after almost 20 years.
I still use them in my car for listening to audio books (in MP3 format). My car *does* have an USB jack as well, but having the disc player means I can switch between two different channels (say, a book on the CD and music on the USB) without losing my place in either. I'd be just as happy with two USB jacks; it's all about having multiple channels of entertainment that each keep track of where you left off.
I still need an optical drive because my latest obsession is buying used CDs for $0.25-2.00 and ripping them. I'm able to get all the albums I couldn't afford when I was a starving single person, and all the ones I missed during the '00s when my tastes were different.
I mostly still use WMP for this, because it has the one neat feature that allows it to start ripping as soon as a CD is inserted without even pressing a button. This allows you to save a minute or two if you have to rip a stack. I'm about to ditch it for Freerip, however, because WMP does occasionally fail to rip a track (which can be missed because the track listing disappears when the disc is ejected) and usually hangs on startup for no apparent reason until the system is rebooted. WMP is discontinued, so these issues will never be fixed.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
My wife is a part-time photographer and occasionally works a wedding or graduation taking photos. If people want to buy a copy of the photos to print at their leisure, I burn them to CD or DVD depending on the amount of photos.
I originally bought a BluRay drive for my PC to condense the DVD backups I had onto fewer discs, but now use it to make backups of any Blu Ray movies that I buy.
Also still burn the occasional music CD for the missus to use in her car.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
If I order a CD off of Amazon a lot of the times it's CHEAPER than buying the MP3 album - and it comes with the MP3 album already ripped as a bonus. If it weren't for the fact I like to rip my disk to ogg I could put the CD in the box unopened and it would be cheaper than buying the digital album. Yes I realize I could convert the MP3s to ogg, don't lose site of what I'm doing here.
I buy my movies mostly on BluRay, when I buy a DVD I usually buy them from a super cheap bargain bin for $3 each. I rip them and put them on my media server. I don't have to worry about bandwidth caps or my unreliable cable connection to watch movies I bought that way. I have a toddler, on weekdays my TV pretty much plays Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, and Popeye non-stop. I would rather play it all off of that hard drive that I filled up off of my legally purchased DVD's than have the bad karma or pirating. (even though half or more of that is in the public domain - the restored versions are worth a few bucks)
Yes I Netflix and Amazon Prime. I don't trust all of these companies to be perpetually available, and I don't trust the gestapo not to take over the Internet.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
R/W or even write-once CDs and DVDs have been known to have finite shelf lives for decades now. Yes.
One solution is to rewrite them every few years, but that's time consuming, and unless you have a really compelling reason to do so, the investment needed to make this practical, with autoloaders, labelers, and such is prohibitive. At work, the old mainframe reel tape libraries were converted to robotics 30 years ago, then converted to cartridges, and and finally about 12 years ago to a virtualized tape environment - all the requests still refer to carts and such, as if the arms are still running around grabbing plastic, but it's in a SAN and that's properly backed up and virtualized, at least so far as we can tell. Hopefully it's secured better than the storage on the Z series that went tits up this spring. I only lost around 20 VMs, but one had around 100 million customer reports that were lost, and the application software, and the server OS and all other software. About 7000 or so VMs were lost, some irretrievably since the owners didn't have offline copies. If Infoworld still published on paper, this would have worthy of the back page.
The best practice is probably to replicate that and copy optical media to something more durable, replicate it, and keep the originals if you must in a cooler environment, as heat seems to be a factor. Some brands have had worse longevity than others, but that's a crap shoot.
Now ask me about my cassette tape archives, or the 10" reel tapes I would have to buy a machine to use... Sentimental value now, I'm sure they would need go go back to 3M to be recovered.
Data archiving is a pain. I've given in to archiving everything, rather than wring my hands over what 10% of it I really don't need.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My van has a DVD player and it will for some time. Sometimes I use a raspberry pi and let the kids access media that way but it's also always good to have a couple DVDs on hand
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I work for a software large company, and we still ship software on optical media. Of course we also provide downloads, which is what customers actually use. But in some circumstances we are still required to ship physical media. Why? Because of the tax implications!
Last I used was the H&R Block tax software from last year. In fact the disc is still in my laptop drive. I only used the disc version because I got a deal and it was cheaper than a direct download from Amazon.
I've since switched over to Linux full time so I'll probably have to do the taxes next year on my wife's windows laptop. I've been contemplating getting one of those drive caddies that replace the laptop optical drive and allows you to install an additional hard drive. That way I could put in a second SSD!
My desktop actually has two DVD writers, and I've got a spare if I want to go to dual lightscribe burners. But I do tech support as a hobby and deal with obsolete systems allot, so CD might be the only common media(no network, USB doesn't work anymore, DVD is right out) between me and the control computer for a robotics system. So even my laptop needs to be able to burn discs, but then I'm looking to get a GPU dock so I can stick s serial card onto my laptop for working with PLCs. But I like my weird mix of cutting edge and really old tech, it lets me work on a lot more systems than would otherwise be practical.
I actually need to dub a large number of VHSs to DVD then rip them to my NAS anyways, so multiple drives will help(admittedly, I'll probably manage to saturate the for write speed well before I run out of drives to work with).
I like having options every computer I work with on a day to day basis or I own has at minimum USB DVD multi recorder hanging on it if it happens to not have a ODD built in.
I don't use them a lot anymore but there is no cheaper method of giving files to people offline that's as easy to use and reliable.
I've never used a cd or dvd as a backup media aside from the os recovery discs you get to burn yourself because they aren't included with new PCs anymore.
I've got discs burned discs from 2004 that still read fine. I've been throwing a bunch of them away lately I didn't use to be very good at labeling my discs. Most of it is junk but I still have a few boot discs that I still use today. The current version of Gparted doesn't allow resizing certain partition types anymore. But the version I had laying in a drawer for the last 10 years works fine.
NINAB Newer Is Not Always Better
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
All the time.
The most common is music; I attend lots of concerts of small or local bands, and they usually have CD's for sale. Sure, I could probably download later but it's easier to just buy the CD while I'm there (make sure I don't forget!) and it's nice as the band finds it worth their while to travel and play shows (yeah, I could buy more t-shirts, but I already have more than I need...).
I still prefer Blu-Ray to streaming, the picture and sound quality is much better and I don't have to worry about something like Netflix no longer having a movie I like due to licensing (which has happened). That could change someday, and probably will, but for now...
I'm also one of few people that likes 3D blu-ray; I don't watch in 3D often, but every once in a while it's a fun gimmick.
secure boot / UEFI isses based on format GTP / MBR can come up with usb boot and it can very system to system
Optical media is WORM - write once, read many. This makes it secure against tampering after it's been written, so something like a ransomware virus can't destroy your backup even if it's still online. You also can't do something stupid like find that a file you need has become corrupted, plug in your backup drive, and accidentally copy the corrupt file over your backup instead of the other way around (I've done that).
I've been saying for 20+ years that our random access storage media like HDDs and flash memory needs a physical write-protect switch. It would solve so many problems. A significant percentage of the computer support customers I get are to recover media which has become unreadable because they plugged it into a device to watch a movie or copy a few files, and when they unplugged it (without first unmounting) the device screwed up the partition table or FAT making it unreadable. "All my kids' baby photos are on there and my wife will kill me if I can't get them back."
And if OSes were designed to run off read-only media (write temp files and log files elsewhere), they'd essentially be invulnerable to rooting. A buffer overflow vulnerability might allow an attacker to execute an arbitrary command, but they wouldn't be able to leverage it to modify the system so they have root access after a reboot. Data breaches wouldn't be impossible, but they'd be much, much harder.
But aside from write-protect switches on SD cards and WORM media, everyone seems to overlook the usefulness of being able to store data as read-only.
Optical media is also dirt cheap. SSDs/Flash memory is around 30 cents/GB. HDDs around 10 cents/GB. BD-Rs are around 2 cents/GB and if they follow the same pattern as CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, will eventually settle at around 0.8 cents/GB.
It still has its uses, and for those of us with archives going back decades, it would be a colossol feat to upload everything. A good backup strategy should still include some form of hard copy, servers go down now and again just as optical media fails now and again. Naturally it depends in the user, too. For someone with a small collection of personal files, the cloud is likely just fine.
This is probably not a good idea for a work environment where people don't have the knowledge to connect a drive. I have 4tb Sata3 drive I use for backup. Its mounted in the machine. When i want to backup I just pull the back cover off the machine and plug in the drive. Works like a champ. Not so hot if you have a fire but if your just worried about losing data normally it is possible solution. I do this twice a month. Once a quarter I backup everything up to another a loose hard drive I mount via USB Cradle. That drive ends up in the fire safe.
This has kept me from losing data for many years. The drives i use to backup to in the machine I replaced with a faster hard drive last year but the loose ones are older 2TB drives I had for many years.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
for giving large amounts of data (like photo albums) to friends, especially since I have a spindle of DVD-Rs bought years ago that rarely get touched. Also as a backup to my backup (which is encrypted hard drives I can take offsite).
And, the reliability of optical is still pretty damn good in my experience. I just had reason to pull data from a CD-R burned in 2003. One file out of several hundred failed to read, which I ascribe to bad handling (this was a music collection for my kids to play on vacation), more than degraded media. For any data I really want to keep forever, I would replace my DVD backups every few years with fresh burns from primary storage. I have looked into upgrading to BD-R but the cost is too great (for drives and media). I suspect my optical use cases will eventually switch to flash, but that hasn't happened yet.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
I remember when tape backups were the rage, but they quickly proved to be limited in capacity and performance. That is, unless you were willing to pay thousands of dollars for the bleeding edge drives. Even then, they weren't immune to CRC errors, rendering some backups half-useless. And forget about performance. One of the last tape drives I used about a decade ago took 10 minutes to restore a single file from tape. In today's world of networking and seemingly endless storage, that seems to be a pointless endeavor.
My point is that all the mediums we used to rely on for archival purposes are severely outdated and hold little to no promise compared to cloud storage.
So forget about the floppies and optical disks. Use the cloud, Luke.
Not had any need for CD/DVD/BR for many years now. And installing a OS from a good USB stick is way, way faster anyways. But I bought a external USB Blue-ray recorder that I keep on the shelf in case of some weird device with drivers on CD only or something like that. Haven't needed it yet..
I use M-Disc (archival quality) for burning project data for old projects I'm no longer working on. I also use them to burn music disks, and for handing out data when I don't care if I get the disk back. It may not store as much data as a modern flash drive, but often I only want to transfer a handful of files, and CD-R disks are only about 20 cents a disk if you buy them in batches of 50. (Meaning if I want to mail someone some data, the disk costs less than the postage stamp.)
If my machines don't have an integrated reader they get a networked connection to a physical optical drive. OpenBSD, Linux, Windows, QNX, Android, iOS...
I have experience with this. I'm not just pulling this out of my rear end.
CDs - Honestly, they're all pretty much the same now. If you really worry a lot about these, Taiyo Yuden makes high quality discs and Verbatim made ones that use AZO dye may have superior longevity. Maybe. By the time we know if they do or not, nobody will probably care. But honestly any name brand is almost identical in quality to Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim for CDs. That does not apply to other types of discs though.
DVDs - You can buy Taiyo Yuden and you can buy Verbatim. Everything TY makes is great. Most of Verbatim's stuff is great except their cheap Life series of discs which is the same landfill grade crap that everybody else in the industry makes, including TDK. Note that Verbatim also makes DataLifePlus which is top notch and not the same at all as Life series. Skip everybody else here. And nobody knows if dual layer consumer burnable DVDs will last as long as single layer ones do. Again, by the time we figure it out, nobody will probably care to know. In the earlier part of the previous decade most name manufacturers made really high quality DVD media, but the US marketplace demanded lower price, so almost everybody switched to cheap crap. TDK was actually really good at one time, using Taiyo Yuden as their manufacturer, but that hasn't been true for more than a decade now. I specifically mention TDK because the top article does. Note that Sony sometimes does and sometimes does not use top notch manufacturers for their DVD media but you'll never know which they've used until you buy it. Not worth the trouble in my opinion since you know what you get with Verbatim (non-Life series) and Taiyo Yuden. Note that Verbatim uses AZO dye on all their DVDs except the Life series, even though they don't always say so on the packaging.
BluRays - I pretty much stick to Verbatim (again, avoid Life series) and Panasonic here. Taiyo Yuden barely makes BD discs and last I checked they only made a single layer LTH type that some burners and some players may have problems with. LTH discs are a way to leverage existing DVD pressing plants so they can also make BD media and because these discs actually are written and read from backwards from normal BD media, some burners and some players have problems with them. Verbatim also makes some LTH BD discs and some regular BD discs. I advise avoiding the LTH media unless you are sure you can burn it and play it.
I work at a bleeding-edge hitech manufacturing company. Despite the innovative products that we produce, our industry (an indeed many of our tools) uses a lot of old technology. We do send data to customers on DVD, and in fact had a request for floppy data just today. As a matter of personal course, though, no I do not use Optical storage unless I absolutely have to.
... CD-s. Car radio is able to play MP3s but no USB mass-storage input or such. So I write music to CDs to consume in car. DVDs are not supported either. I haven't paid attention to the brand as long as it's a recognizable one - Verbatim, TDK, some more. Older discs still seem to work after some years (except when really scratched physically).
I still rip CDs and load them in a changer.
I just got done burning nearly 100 CD-Rs for a relative who requested a bunch of music. If you don't own a car made in the last 5 years you may not even have an AUX port, let alone Bluetooth. My 17-year-old car has neither, although I did install an aftermarket Bluetooth FM transmitter so I can use my smartphone in that application.
For myself I burn DVDs of live music, with an archival backup residing on an external hard drive just in case the media fails horribly. Minor failures of the media are no problem, as players will skip it and the viewing experience is not really degraded. Do I like to permanently archive data on optical media as my only backup? Not really.
I put my backups onto M-Disk BDs. Before M-disk I was using falcon media. The M-Disks seam to work fine in most BD players / drives.
Because Redbox, libraries, and Handbrake exist.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't use optical disks for backup. They're too slow and there's too much data. I use hot swappable hard drives for backup now, and I suspect I'll be using solid state drives for this purpose in the near future. There just isn't anything fast enough or dense enough to be practical. The most recent backup drives are on-site, and the previous backups are offsite.
I'm trying to wean them off CDs and onto thumb drives (which you can buy in quantity amazingly cheap these days) and maybe, who knows, they'll start buying online in the future.
The point being, it's about comfort zone, and it's bad karma to argue with a customer who's trying to give you money.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I only use the 1,000 archival discs and dvd add the bluray m-discs fail over 50% of the time.
Must have been over 2 years that i actually touched an optical disc in order to insert it into a drive. The last time i bought DVDs was in 2011, because they were cheap. The last time i rented DVDs was in 2013. The last time i bought a CD was ~2008 or 2009.
Just wait till the first provider goes dark, and you lose all your data.
I'll still be sitting here with BACKUP TAPES!!!
Now get off my lawn.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I havent had an optical drive internally installed for at least 7 years. I hahavent OWNED an optical drive for at least 3. Optical sucks. I will occasionally burn my photos to optical just to have them on a different format than flash/HDD.
Good-bye
in which somebody described losing 8000 (sic!) DVDs of data after 4 years of storage.
I'm trying to figure out which part is less believable: That somebody took the time to write stuff to 8000 DVDs (rather than just a few TB hard drives), or that all 8000 went bad.
I have seen at least one case where the laptop does not have an optical drive, yet it comes with Windows 7 / 10 installation media and drivers on DVDs. I'll admit though, this laptop has the downgrade rights (thus the Windows 7), so it at least comes with the Pro edition of Windows. That means the ability to put the DVD in for reinstallation or to install one or the other Windows version is left as an exercise for the company's IT department.
CDs and DVDs are still the preferred transport medium for imaging studies (CT, MRI, etc.) when moving them via sneakernet. While many of those who do imaging are now having online portals for access, there is still a lot of support for CD burned studies. My humble recommendation: Get at least two discs before leaving whatever imaging center you have studies done at if they will give you two. Because Internetz problems and who wants to reschedule a physician appointment because they can't get your study? And because doctor's offices can still accidentally lose your disc in the shuffle or you can forget it and the next day they've shredded it.
Lately I've been pulling stuff off of cds I burned 15, 16 years ago, no problems.
Currently I have a classic AOL free CD nestled under my coffee cup, protecting the table surface. For extra protection against liquids, I cover the center hole with scotch tape.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Yes, I still use optical media.
No, it is not at all strange that a swag bag contained a CD-ROM. Have you seen the difference in cost between even specialty CDs and a thumb drive? Especially when you're only handing out a few megabytes of data. You can get printed credit card style CDs for pennies a piece. You can't get a USB drive for less than a couple of dollars and that's with no special printing or anything.
Handing out thumb drives with 10MB of data on them and special printing is a ridiculous waste of money. Besides, I'm not plugging your infected thumb drive into my PC! Thanks anyway.
DVD-R/RW are dirt cheap and easy to use, plus they keep data for quite some time. They are also somewhat easily mailed although I am now tending more towards sending micro SD cards inserted into an adapter. The micro SD card itself is too likely to fall out of the envelope unless it is taped to a piece of paper. Most people I deal with have a desktop or laptop with optical drives. I would never buy a system that does not have an optical drive/burner (except for a tablet). The craze to eliminate a very versatile device that adds a few bucks and a wee bit of size to a device just makes no sense to me. And dealing with external drives is a pain in the rear.
I have been actively avoiding optical since the late 1990s and haven't put an optical drive in a computer I have built for myself since 2002. In fact, I haven't put one in any desktop I have built since 2010. Optical media is terrible for data storage, even tape makes more sense...
For that matter, I've been phasing out spinning hard disks for years. Sometime in 2009 is the last time I begrudgingly put a hard disk in a desktop. last time I ordered any was when I bought some enterprise-grade ones in 2013 for a file server. All my servers since then have exclusively used SSDs.
Not only is optical basically dead to me in regard to computers (very few drives exist anywhere in my company; I pull my old USB one out and hand it to someone about 2-3 times a year), but it is almost entirely dead for all entertainment media (I download or stream just about everything I watch these days). The blu-ray player isn't even connected to the TV anymore, it just sits in a cupboard collecting dust.
Solid state media is the future. Everything else is either for special use cases (tape - slow archival) or completely obsolete. Give it a couple more years and even cheap laptops will probably have SSDs, at which point HDDs will be forever dead.
That is the media I use the most. If we are talking about storage I have a few "M" disk about the place.
At work, no; recently had an upgrade to various very modern Macs, none of which have optical drives.
For the machines I build and use at home, I still install optical drives, partly because I have years worth of data backed up in that format (which is also on several hard drives, but sometimes it's useful to just pop in a disc and get *that* file). Also, burning a CD/DVD is what I'm used to using for installing new Linux distros.
Ironically enough, write-once optical discs are lousy for archiving - the organic dyes need to be kept at a stable temperature away from moisture and sunlight in order to have a fair chance of remaining stable. And even then you're probably lucky to get 5-10 years without some data loss. And definitely don't use standard permanent/laundry markers on them - the acids in the ink rapidly break down the dyes, and your data with it.
Instead use rewritable media - your data is then stored in a phase-changing crystal and requires considerable energy input to change state. So long as you avoid damaging the disc itself, your data should be safe for a much longer time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I use BD-R as a method of backing up my photography work as I hit certain quotas of data (obviously pointless to burn a BD if I don't have ~25GB waiting to burn to it). I do still buy Blu-ray movies (and lately the 4K UltraHD variants) mostly because a) I want to "own" the movies (even if the studios think they're only licensing the content to me), and b) I like to use tools like makemkv to rip the disc and store it on a hard drive collection of movies. At approximately 25-35GB per movie, it can get kind of large, but the picture quality is worth it.
Wondering how long it'll be before we can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays though. :/
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Every day!
We're all MacBook Pro's and Dell Latitude E7470's - neither of which come with an optical drive. I guess they do have USB ports so a 64GB stick would work. And we did order an external CD/DVD-RW unit. We do have servers with optical drives in them.
I have an old PC that requires optical media to install an OS on it. (Its BIOS cannot boot from a USB flash drive.) Once I retire that machine, I will probably never use optical media again.
Ok, I have over a decade of experience working in archival, and another as professional sysadmin.
Day to day I don't use optical anymore, except for throwaway install support of older systems without useful usb drives.
That said, how does someone lose that much data as in summary after 4 years? BY ARCHIVING LIKE AN IDIOT.
It's okay to use optical as a straight up filesystem backup, but as soon as you introduce a depenency on the next disk to recover, you are fucked. NO ONE in backups does this. Each tape is a straight up HW compressed archive of the files, raw. No spanning. EVER. We will actually change a tape (well the robot will) and not fill the tape if a file is too big.
Last year I recovered 90% of data from a 10 year old 100 disk spindle provided by my old roommate. He lived in squalor, treated them like crap, exposed to all manner of temperatures. He used regular quality DVD-Rs and the failure rate was about 5% all told. Most disks were good. Many had a failure on a single file or two, which did not completely prevent me from recovering (think, a few frames of a Dragonball episode or something). Probably 2-3% of disks could not be read at all.
So my case basically is if you lose everything backing up to optical, you did it wrong.
That said, optical is trash and I'm glad its dead. It was good for its time, but now I think it TB, and 50 doesn't cut it.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
For people I know who aren't tech savvy, CDs and DVDs are cheap way to share data.
What you want is a USB optical drive. I found a good, Linux-compatible USB blu-ray drive and DVD burner on Amazon for about $20. You only need to get it out when you're actually going to use it. I leave mine velcroed to the underside of my desk.
I still buy a lot of music on CD (if the available digital downloads aren't good enough quality.) I've also started buying movies on Blu-Ray, because the quality is noticeably better than streaming.
have you experienced any problems with M-DISC?
and you burn a Linux LiveCD onto one?
Playing CDs, etc. Also, I deal with Department of Defense, and all data passed is via CDs or DVDs, no memory sticks allowed. Drives are necessary. Also for cars, I burn custom CDs with music, using my smartphone is cumbersome, and two of my cars do not have a jack for access via smartphone.
4TB 2.5" external hard disks go for about $120, and I bought one for about $100. That's $25-30/TB. Amazon sell 15x25GB archival-grade Blu-Ray disks for $67.50, which is $180/TB.
And not even that much more expensive to use SSD's (if you're worried about stiction) than archival-grade Blu-Ray disks. I'm seeing internal SSD's in the $240 range; USB3 enclosures are cheap. If you want it packaged, it's going to set you back a bit more, but still less than double the price of archival Blu-Rays.
i use dvd-r for media backup as its price per gb is still far less then flash drives.
When I've tracked branded CD/DVD/BluRay back to the source, I most often find branded products were all made in the same factory anyway, so why buy anything more expensive. And, yes, I still have DVDs and CDs from 10 or more years ago that are as fresh as the day they were made.
I still use DVD for some movies and TV (things I want to own permanently, last thing I added to the collection was the whole series box set of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis is on my wishlist as well) and the optical drive in my PC is useful as well both for installing software that comes on disk (e.g. I buy games at retail if they are cheaper than buying from digital store and those still come on disk for the most part) and for burning data to if I need to give it to someone (e.g. if I want to burn some photos and give them to someone permanently, a burnt DVD is the easy and cheap way to do that)
I was setting up a brand new laptop for a client. It's a Dell with Wind7 Pro 64-bit but obviously came with the silly WIn10 installation media.
The plan was to install a new SSD in the laptop, and then get WIn7 back on there fresh with no bloatware (as you do).
After the SSD install, I tossed in a Dell-branded Win7 SP1 DVD I happen to have, and installed from there. However, the laptop is so new that the DVD did not contain any network drivers (typical) but surprisingly didn't include the proper chipset drivers either for the USB controllers/hubs/ports. I almost always have either network, or more typically the USB ports working after a Windows 7 install.
Without either of those, I was reduced to throwing some of the drivers on a write-able CD. Thankfully I still insist on recommending laptops with optimal drives. If the laptop had not come with an optical drive, and had I not had writable CDs laying around, I guess I would have taken the SSD out and plugged it into my desktop to transfer over the drivers...
I was not excited about having to write a CD, but at least it was an option.
As for DVDs, I write those ALL the time. =D
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/why-facebook-thinks-blu-ray-discs-are-perfect-for-the-data-center/
Zero-power long-term archive
My family's road trip vehicle is a 2000 Odyssey with a CD player. So lately I've discovered the joy of curating a selection of music down to fit on a CD. Limitations improve quality.
I even have the playlists on my ipod, for when I want just the good bits.
that I use for backups.
'Specially optical.
It's the most practical backup media.
[a] READ-ONLY! There's no chance of over-writing the archived files
[b] compact. the discs stack nicely on the spindle they came on
[c] won't get "eaten" like tapes can
[d] not affected by magnets
[e] last for years
Why not "the cloud"?
[a] If you do not have physical posession of the data, you do not own the data (it's at-best a hostage)
[b] If your data traverses a public network, your data is not secure (somebody else has a copy and only chance and time limit decryption)
[c] Do you own the cloud? Though not. Will the terms of service change? Will the ownership change? How certain can you be that they are responsibly backing up your data, not looking at it, not making copies and not letting others, including their own employees, have access?
Reckless morons use "the cloud" for things that matter
A couple of machines have a hard time booting from pen drives, so I use their CD-only driver to boot Plop with an external DVD reader to boot bigger distros in sequence. BTW, the machines are not so feeble, one was CD-only, the other had a DVD which went belly up and was replaced by a CD reader I had at hand (probably from an upgrade to DVD in some other computer).
I also use in some places to boot Linux whenever needed, because it has richer tools than other systems. But I do prefer to boot from usb drives.But CDs/DVDs are good in a sense, because it's easy to burn an image -- while certain Linuces are quite pesky regarding how one creates the bootable usb flash drive.
Except Manjaro, that is... it does not boot.
because hey, it might actually work, who knows?
To quote the PC World online review verbatim (cough) it says:
----begin quote-----
DoD tested
As to that thousand-year claim, the U.S. Navy will back that up. It tested M-Disc DVD+Rs along with archival quality DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW, subjecting them three times to a 185-degree, 85-percent humidity, full-spectrum light environment for 26.25 hours. Every DVD failed—except the M-Discs, which suffered no noticeabl
PCWorld
500 - Server Error
Oops! We're not able to find the page you're looking for. Here are some options to help you get back on the right track:
---- end quote ----
Hey, what could go wrong?
I use optical media for installs, too.
Also: They're handy for watching movies or collections of old TV shows from DVDs - especially at my ranch (where Internet is 32k-ish dialup if I didn't bring a cellphone modem from work) or on the road in the travel trailer.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
On my laptops, I find a second drive or additional battery much more useful then a optical drive, which is something I can always access from my desktop on the rare occasion when I need it - which I have't for last 5 years (including for bootable media requirements such as OS installations or BIOS upgrades). I still carry the swappable tray as in my laptop bag as a backup option. Just holding off on removing it totally like most things in my house that should have been pragmatically trashed long ago.
I haven't really used optical media at all in at least five years, now that I think about it. For general 'moving data about' purposes, cloud services (Google Drive/Dropbox etc.) or USB sticks work well. For backups, external hard drives (or internal hard drives placed into a NAS) are cheap and large enough now to be the best option, even though they too might fail (so don't have only one backup!)
I think the only time I ever use an optical drive now is when reformatting a machine or setting a new one up - on occasion I might want to DBAN the drive or use some other kind of recovery utility on a bootable CD/DVD that I burnt years ago and can't be bothered making a bootable USB for.
Maybe Bill Gates and I are the only ones ... but CD Audio is the only source I am aware of for lossless audio. I buy all my music on CD Audio and rip it to WAV ... /shrug
Of course, in medicine, all radiology exams are burned to cd if access is needed outside of the home institution. I will rarely get a thumb drive with a scan, almost always cd. Due to HIPAA and various conflicting systems, cds will remain for a long time.
bb
I still use optical media, but not for long-term data storage or transport. I primarily use DVD and CD to run bootable diagnostics, repair or cleanup tools (memtest86+, WinPE, DBAN, etc) and OS installation. I've long found booting from optical media to be far more reliable and supported than booting from USB, despite being significantly slower. Granted, USB boot support has improved, but I still periodically encounter systems that outright refuse to boot from USB, even with SecureBoot disabled. Besides, when running WinPE to clean up a potentially-infected computer, it's definitely beneficial to use read-only boot media.
Also, Taiyo Yuden doesn't make DVD+R DL discs. Verbatim supposedly made high quality DVD+R DL discs in Singapore, but a few years ago they moved production to UAE, and the reviews aren't very good for those.
I just got a BD-RE writer in a new laptop, and have no idea what a good brand for BD discs is. I haven't looked into it, as I don't have a need to burn BDs yet.
If you want to archive anything important use M-Disc Blu-ray's or DVD's. Read up on exactly how tough and reliable they are even in harsh environments. The data is written on a mineral layer in the disc. Or you could carve the bits directly into stone yourself. The drives that support M-Disc have also come down reasonable levels also.
I develop a DVD to install Linux + Openstack on a system. We distribute as .iso and test as a physical DVD with instructions on burning on Win 7 w/ the included isoburn.
Some customers can use iDrac/iLo/IPMI to mount the .iso for install or convert the .iso to a USB stick to boot that. Not all BIOS can and they're all different. We leave that up to the clueful users and lead the neophytes down the easy path with a burned .iso.
I've found that burning an ISO takes less time than ubootin. On that note, is there a way to verify the DVD matches the .iso? We md5 the .iso, but the isoburn verify doesn't really verify :-( It needs to be on Windows & distributable too.
< rant natured="good" > Apparently (I've asked a few folks) "the 605" is short for "the 605 *Freeway*" Yet if you say "the Main Street Bridge" you mean, the bridge on Main Street. If you say "the Main Street six-lane street" you mean "the part of Main Street that is a six-lane street." So I hear "the 605 Freeway" as "the part of Interstate 605 which is a limited-access highway ('freeway'), but because Interstates by definition are entirely limited-access, that's all of it, so what are you talking about?" You wouldn't say "Get your kicks on 'the' 66" would you? Why not just say you are on 605 North? No redundant "the" required. </rant>
I once drove to San Diego and wound up spending an hour extra in traffic, gone too far because I was told to exit at "the 125" so obviously I was looking for Interstate 125. However, they meant California 125. I never expected a regular road to be called "the Number" so I was looking for the red-and-blue Interstate shield. Thus:
Serious question: Would you, or would you not, actually call U.S. Route 66 (on one of its "Main Street" style sections) "the 66" or do you really only call limited-access highways "the" --?
I still use optical media, but much less so than before.
For audio and video media, CD and DVD are my first choice, but as a means to an end. I have several used disc sources, and a couple of local stores still selling new material. It becomes an automatic backup once I rip the discs to the file format needed, but the media itself is infrequently used once on my file server.
DVD+/-R and BD-Rs became secondary backup sources. USB hard drives are much more convenient, but I'll additionally burn valuable data to blu-ray, periodically testing the discs for readability.
With a Gigabit+wireless AC network at home, I have little need for optical media for everyday use. An external USB optical drive for my laptop is more than sufficient for the odd need. I'll litter available desktop PC slots with optical drives.
The reason we use them is 99% of our customer base is so paranoid about the internet that they generally restrict access and for the machines our software is installed on, there is ZERO internet access allowed. We also can not bring in our smart phones and our laptops must have all wire ports and camera "taped over" with security tape. Things like thumb drives are strictly prohibited. For this optical is the only choice.
I haven't used any kind of disk in quite a few years. Just thumb drives, hard drives and wireless.
Until we can get full lossless music download in flac or something similar, I'll be sticking with optical media. If you have good hearing, a decent stereo and care, the compression artifacts in mp3/aac/ogg can be very distracting.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
If you do some quick math, you'll see that cheap 25GB (really 23.2GB) BD-R 50-packs have a significantly lower cost per gigabyte than any hard drive. When you realize that you need TWO hard drives instead of one due to the many ways a hard drive can fail unexpectedly and lose everything (even when that drive is an "on the shelf" "cold storage" unit) then the advantages become even greater.
As long as you choose a good quality large capacity CD wallet, put the discs in it properly, and store it in a dry climate-controlled area and are gentle with the CD wallet, the discs practically last forever. For large amounts of infrequently accessed data and for regular backups, it's hard to beat the BD-R discs.
Of course, the big disadvantage is that Blu-ray drives are rare and you essentially have to buy your own if you want one, but that's a simple one-time investment in an external desktop-sized burner which can be plugged into any computer you own now or in the future.
Why would someone own a computer with no ability to use shared cheap media? Seriously, until the cost of a thumb drive is measured in cents instead of dollars; the optical media is here to stay. It comes down to being able to share data in a durable format.
NRRPT/RCT
Have you considered M-disc? Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
I carry a folder full of DVD's and a few BD's in order to occasionally re-image the computers I service. Sometimes it's easier for an IT department to request an engineer go out and do this rather them dial in to fix a fault. That way they get a clean copy of the os and applications as it was built on a master machine somewhere. It's pretty rare for important files to be stored locally, so this approach makes sense.
Sometimes the machines don't have a DVD drive (and never a BD one) or it has one but it's so ancient it doesn't work, or it's a CD drive, which is no good. For this I carry a drive around with me.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I still buy all my music, movies and TV series on CD or DVD. Google, Apple and friends can stick their walled gardens up they're arse - we're allowed to format shift here so I start with optical discs and transform them to whatever format my network and devices desire. When it comes to dealing with data things get burned to 2 CDRs or DVDRs for redundancy with 25% .par2 files for recovery.
I've been using Millenata MODISC for backing up my wife's tens of thousands of pics of the kids. Outside of our normal backup processes, about once a year I get a box of discs (not cheap but affordable) and pull off all of the past year's photos, then I tuck them into a fireproof safe and leave it under our deck. (I'm trying to protect against fire and theft more than anything else)
I also spot-check older discs and the ones from 4 years ago, when I started, are still readable. The discs are said to last 1000 years and I'll be happy with 2% of that...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Still have (6) CD-R's that I burned on a Pinnacle burner back in 1993 (@ 1x) and they are still readable. Of course they cost ~$40 a piece.
CD-R's and DVD-R's from a few years ago, not stored in any place special, well they're flaky... Quality of the media pure and simple.
Encrypt and store/upload offsite? No thanks. That's giving blind faith to someone or some company to handle your data properly and also
be around in the future. What has history taught us about encryption? It's broken a vast majority of the time.
I gave up on optical as a backup method when CDs I had burned back in the mid-90's on archive grade discs stopped working. Even with entertainment products (music, movies, TV shows) I immediately backup the discs to a file server for long term storage. At this point there is no optical format capable of storing enough data to suit my needs. For added protection of non-replaceable content like photos I post them to online services like Facebook, Google+, and Amazon Photos.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
--Some people may want optical to die out, but I think that's premature. I still use it a lot -- all of my PCs, laptops and servers have optical drives. (Not necessarily hooked up for security on the servers, but at least available if needed.)
--Creating a reliable USB-based boot media is still something of a black art, it seems to be different for every distro; altho System Rescue CD is pretty easy. Optical is cheap and Just Works 99.98% of the time. The media is cheap enough to give away or only use once if needed (altho I do try to use R/W media for that) and if you get a bad burn or you use it enough that it wears out, you can just burn another one.
--I do a lot of Linux installs and lately have been doing Disaster Recovery tests (bare-metal restores) to VMs and new drives. Years ago, I took the time to learn how to burn from the Linux command line, and most of my stuff is burned right from Linux with scripts; Torrent ISO downloads coupled with ZFS has been doing a great job of keeping the ISOs from bitrotting. Burning the recovery-environment ISO is dead easy since I have spare media, and I don't have to spend $$ for a reliable high-speed USB thumbstick or three to re-use for that purpose.
--Yes, a good USB3 thumbstick is faster. But in my experience, optical is easier, as long as you buy good media -- I buy and recommend Taiyo Yuden wherever possible. You have to buy specialized models of USB thumbstick if you want to block Writes, and quality on some drives is iffy; Optical is write-once by default unless you go out of your way (not finalizing the disc, packet writing, using RW media.) So yes, I intend to keep using optical because it meets my needs.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??