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?

Comments

Archival grade

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re: Archival grade

[GrumpySteen]

English is a living language, not a dead language like Latin. In living languages, the meanings of words and phrases evolves and changes over time. When almost everyone is using a particular word or phrase in a certain way, that way becomes a valid meaning.

That is what has happened with the phrase "begs the question", which means that everyone else is actually right and the pedants are wrong. In fact, the pedants who keep making this argument are actually trying to get everyone to behave as if English was a dead language in some misguided notion that they're protecting it.

So suck on that, pedant.

Re: Archival grade

[jabberw0k]

the pedants who keep making this argument are actually trying to get everyone to behave as if English was a dead language in some misguided notion that they're protecting it.

Contrariwise, we are trying to actively change English to be better. I will protest the use of "orientate" (should be "orient" just as "inform" not "informate" is correct) and the awkward and irritating Los Angeles-style "I was on the 10" instead of the better "I was on I-10" (or Route 10, or Highway 10, or Interstate 10) for the same reason: if English is a living language, we can improve it just as much as we can dumb it down.

Re: Archival grade

[sexconker]

Not all change is good. Much of the change we see is harmful to the language as it introduces ambiguity and causes confusion, which makes it harder for the language to do its only job - help people communicate.

Languages are highly ordered systems. Retards like you are "literally" running about spouting off about doing things "ironically" and are, "for all intensive purposes", entropy endangering the system "irregardless" of your dumbass "language changes" excuse.

Re: Archival grade

[sexconker]

They're not using the official name of the interstate or highway. It's a simple abbreviation and rarely has ambiguity. It's no different from shortening the name of a street from "21st street" to "21st".

I'd find saying "interstate 10" or "highway 101" every time more awkward and irritating. But this is a "soda" vs. "pop" debate. Until you can't tell what "the 605 North" means because there's some other highway/freeway/etc. with a conflicting name in the same vicinity it's not incorrect. (Further, it's officially named the "San Gabriel River Freeway", not Interstate 605.)

Re: Archival grade

[undefinedreference]

The Los Angeles style is better with lower overhead than other forms. It flows in communication and doesn't add excessive irrelevant information. Considering they operate primarily in their metro area, it works very well. Nobody cares what type of road it is because it is irrelevant. If you want a truly bad system, drop "the" entirely. That's how they do it in San Francisco and a number of areas they have influenced. The negative effects are severe.

I have to disagree on "orient", as it overloads a word that is used as a noun or adjective. "Orientate" is a verb. All words based on it are as well. I believe people on this site primarily speak AmE and the term comes from BrE, which is probably why you are so confused by and resistant to it.

Re: Archival grade

[Coren22]

I get literally pissed off when people do that.

Sorry, I just had to do it.

Re: Archival grade

[Quirkz]

Language drifting doesn't bother me much in general. However, I would prefer to take a stand in cases where the drift would cause the language to lose functionality. In this case, "begs the question" is a short an easy way to convey a particular concept that doesn't have other analogues, whereas there's lots of other ways to say "it poses the question" or "it brings up the question". Given the choice between losing a useful phrase or telling people to learn their language right, I pick user instruction.

Re: Archival grade

[AK Marc]

In Dallas, "the turnpike", "central" and "the tollway" all refer to separate sections of road independently. They are based on current or past "common" names of sections of road. None are "proper". All are unambiguous.

In part, the informal terms are more proper. They convey not only unambiguous meaning about the subject, but also convey information about the speaker. "I went west on Interstate 30, Tom Landry Freeway" that would reveal the speaker to be a non-native of the area. The Turnpike stopped being a turnpike in '78, but that was the common name, and has continued to be used as such by locals.

Language isn't solely to convey a thought, but to communicate about those involved in the conversation. And for that, inexact language is best. When there are a million ways to say something, the way you pick says something about you.

Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[alternative_right]

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.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[TWX]

I like the fact that once I have my CDs and DVDs they can't take-back the rights when I have physical media, and I don't have to worry about losing my media when I have a hard disk failure.

In practice this is also true for Blu-Ray. If I remember what I read back when the Blu-ray standard was first released there was apparently a mechanism to invalidate Blu-ray discs, but I don't think it's been applied in-practice and you'd have to have a network-connected player that the vendor is still providing updates to for that to happen anyway.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[TheGratefulNet]

I'm no BD expert but I was under the impression that a 'kill list' can be present in media and there is no need to have a network connection to have things be invalidated (media and even equip!). simply by PLAYING a disc, you run the risk of having things that worked yesterday, not work today.

I never bought a bd player by choice (one came with a laptop I had no choice in) and I won't support that standard. its evil to to the corp (SIC intended).

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[caseih]

Except that optical media isn't that durable or reliable. Every DVD or CD I've ever burned has become unreadable after a few years. The inks just don't hold the data for long. Pressed disks last a lot longer of course, but there are many documented cases of the aluminum layer of CDs being damaged.

And it's no longer a great or cheap way to pass information to others since fewer and fewer computers come with optical drives these days.

If you're going to use optical media as archival storage or backup, you'll want to copy the data to fresh media on a regular basis (every few years at least). Of course the same goes for any form of data storage these days.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[Anonymous Coward]

I can verify this was true for PS3 a few years ago. An inserted BD often requested to update the firmware because I never went online with that console. If I refused to to the upgrade, the PS3 refused to play the movie on the BD.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[OtisSnerd]

I have collected almost a thousand audio CDs over the past 25 years, and used to think the same thing. They served as masters for the digital copies I keep on my PC. Now I've discovered that a few of them are suffering from visible bit-rot, with the aluminum layer slowly being eaten / corroded in from the edge. It could be because I lived in a heavy urban area (Philly near I95) with lots of diesel exhaust until last year, but I've also taken very good care of them, keeping them in their cases and minimizing handling, but who knows how much longer they'll last.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[TheDarkMaster]

Stop using shitty and cheap media. I have CDs from 2000 still working, properly stored in individual boxes and inside a environment protected from light and heat (backup CDs).

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[deadwill69]

I have disks that old myself. To slow this process, I pull them out every few years and get a baby diaper and some pledge. Does wonders on cleaning them up and giving them a lite protective coating. I haven't had a problem re-ripping anything I've pulled out yet, but I know those days are numbered.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[sexconker]

Didn't we have a story last year about Facebook storing your old photos on Blu-Rays with some automated jukebox system?

The idea was that no one looks at old photos, so it doesn't matter if it takes a short time for a little robot arm to retrieve a disc and and load em up when your best friend from high school dies and you decide to take a depressed stroll through memory lane.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[AmiMoJo]

The way it works is that they can generate millions of device keys. Every playback device must have a device key, and must then execute a Java app on the disc that, among other things, validates that key. They have the ability to revoke keys by including a list of revoked ones on the disc.

So in practice old discs will still play, but new ones might refuse to play until your firmware is upgraded or just at all. Previously keys for cracked software players like PowerDVD have been revoked, with users provided with a free upgrade to the software.

I think they have largely abandoned the idea now, as BluRay is completely cracked anyway and the master keys were found many years ago.

I have a USB DVD-RW, but no BluRay drive.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[mlts]

I have a stack of CD-Rs I burned back in 1996 which are still readable, and I pulled a file for a MMO from some CDs I made back in 2000. The info is obsolete, but it is still present on the media. The trick back then was to run Linux and cdrecord, with as few items running in the background as possible, just to ensure there would be no buffer underruns since there wasn't any protection against that back then.

I would say it really depends on the media for archival life. Some optical media is junk, other media will last for a very long time.

Re:Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable

[c0d3g33k]

I have music disks that I purchased in the mid 80's near the dawn of the CD era that still play fine. I buy used CDs from Goodwill that aren't quite that old, but I've yet to find one that doesn't play due to deterioration. Same with the public library. The only thing that seems to affect playability is scratches or actual damage to the data layer.

I'd call that pretty durable.

Red Box is Cheap

[WheezyJoe]

Cheapest way to rent a movie that I know of, even considering online options.

We burn a ton of DVD's every week

[gurps_npc]

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.

Re:We burn a ton of DVD's every week

[freeze128]

Yeah, but that's a LAW FIRM. You also use FAX on a daily basis.

Re:We burn a ton of DVD's every week

[DRJlaw]

For whatever reason, faxes are considered legal paperwork while email is not... even if the fax was sent over IP anyway.

It has nothing to do with whether something is considered "legal paperwork" or not. An email can form a written contract (or be a written communication) as assuredly as a couriered piece of paper or a facsimile.

Fax machines provide delivery confirmation (your fax machine reports whether the entire facsimile was received by the machine at the telephone number that it dialed). You know where it went, and you know that the entire thing got there.

Email, at least historically, hit the Pachinko machine of SMTP relay servers. You knew where it was supposed to go, but you had no idea whether it got there (Do you send read receipts every time someone requests one? REALLY?). These days, it's less Pachinko machine and more Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You know where it's supposed to go, but you have no idea whether it got eaten by the external spam service, the firewall, the internal spam filter, the email client spam filter, or Uncle Horace's all purpose AI email sorter.

The courts have (almost all) converted to electronic filing and docket systems, so no, there's no electronic exception what's considered legal paperwork. If you want to serve someone with a pleading or motion in a case, you can even do it by email, if they've agreed to accept service by email (and thus agreed to be responsible for any screw up in the external spam service, the firewall, the internal spam filter, the email client spam filter, or Uncle Horace's all purpose AI email sorter).

It's all about achieving a level of assurance that "they got it."

Clean OS install

[sinij]

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.

Yeah, unfortunately we do.

[Dust038]

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.

Linux ISO discs...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re:Linux ISO discs...

[InDifferent9109]

I'm sure there's some benefit in creating a bootable USB stick, but every time I've gone to do it I had to look up some guide or download some application to get it done. With optical media it's literally just burn the disc and you're done.

Yes, for now...

[RogueyWon]

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.

Medical information

[phorm]

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

disposable media

[i.r.id10t]

All the time, as disposable media. Give some data to someone, don't care if you get the disc back.

Re:disposable media

[Anne Thwacks]

optical media is great because it is Read Only. using a USB flash drive or hard drive is risky because it can get infected with something and then transferred.

This

I use tape for backup/archive, but to send CNC data to the factory, I use CDs. That way, they cannot claim I sent them something else. Anyway, if you sent them USB sticks/SD cards, they would probably lose them because they are too small (its a FACTORY).

Government Networks

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

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.

Great for backup

[kushaldas]

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.

Yes, because optical is READ ONLY.

[kheldan]

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.

Re:Yes, because optical is READ ONLY.

[myrdos2]

Unless someone starts producing USB flash drives that have a hardware write protect switch that can't be countermanded by software

Those already exist.

Re:In related news,

[fisted]

Oh they have no volume knob, so I figured in case one is too quiet, I'll add a second one, hook them up in parallel and make sure I play everything in sync.
That way I cut the output impedance in half AND (via constructive interference) double the amplitude!

Yard Sales

[rickb928]

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.

And about 1.44 disks?

[fire4ever]

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.

Building a huge-- and legal-- music collection.

[operagost]

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.

This is not a new issue

[rickb928]

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.

Media and taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:No

[JaredOfEuropa]

Got a bunch of Blurays but never played them, in fact most are still in the wrapper. I only get them because legal digital download-to-own doesn't exist (not really). So I "steal" movies via torrent and buy the Blurays as a license for the ones I want to keep. Everything is played from a NAS, music as well, haven't bothered with CDs in ages.

Don't dismiss WORM media yet

[Solandri]

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.

What you need to know about optical media

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

Yes

[jgotts]

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.

Only SOME Optical Media Is Durable

[Immerman]

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.

Re:Only SOME Optical Media Is Durable

[Darinbob]

My headache has been the CD/DVD readers. As the speeds got faster they started having more and more problems reading pressed discs from many different sources, and the discs work fine on other readers.