Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Use Optical Media? 385
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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 wa
Re: Archival grade (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
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
Re: Archival grade (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:3)
I get literally pissed off when people do that.
Sorry, I just had to do it.
Re: (Score:3)
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 b
Re: Archival grade (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yes, Because Optical Media Is Durable (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Can't speak for more recent stuff, but I just pulled some data from a couple DVDs that I burned in June of 2014. No problems.
Re: (Score:3)
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 m
Re: (Score:3)
Only SOME Optical Media Is Durable (Score:3)
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 crys
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
You've just discovered the DRM worm. A real one.
Looks like you'll be buying the White Album again.
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
For example the first backup on DVD-R starts with the last CD-R and adds newer stuff, the first backup on BD-R begins with the last DVD-R and adds newer stuff. Of course I'm not referring to complete system backups, rather backups of source code hierarchies, document hierarchies, etc. Music, videos, photos hierarchies not included; they are better backed up to external USB
Re: (Score:2)
Unless it came from Warner Brothers.
Then it has bit-rot even if it looks pristine on the surface and if you email that about it they don't give you the courtesy of a fuck-you.
No (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
No but I'm optimistic (Score:2)
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 ge
Getting There (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have two optical media readers in my world.
#1- computer at work has a reader. I don't know if it works, I've never used it...computer is 3 years old.
#2- my Xbox 360 has a reader. About 4 years ago one of my kids broke it, and it has caused me zero inconvenience since then. Occasionally I will get new games, but it is always a download.
The last time I thought about optical media was when my mom came to visit. She wanted to show me some pictures, or a movie, or something and she held up a DVD like it wa
Re: (Score:2)
Red Box is Cheap (Score:3)
Cheapest way to rent a movie that I know of, even considering online options.
Re: (Score:2)
A few years back some of my wife's friends were coming over and she told me to go to the store to get a Redbox DVD. I said no, we'll just stream the movie from Vudu. She said that Redbox was cheaper. I rebutted with the fact that the difference between streaming and Redbox was not worth my time to go to the store, stand in a queue, get the DVD, and then repeat the next day.
There have been enough times when I've gone into a store, seen a queue of people standing at the Redbox, I make my purchases, and the sa
Re: (Score:2)
True. It gets annoying when there's a queue browsing and looking puzzled at the machine. They haven't learned that that you reserve in advance, online (sigh, get with it people, there's an app on your phone). With practice, if you're lucky to be in an area with lots of these machines, you learn which ones don't draw the crowd of impulse renters, and you can quickly be on your way. And if you're on the road anyway to pick up some chips or a pizza, it's not a thing.
There's bound to be a day when online ca
We burn a ton of DVD's every week (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Medical information (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:We burn a ton of DVD's every week (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
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 whe
Clean OS install (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I too recently used my PC-BSD DVD to reinstall the OS, after an update to 10.3 had left me w/ just the CLI.
Also, both the laptops that I last bought had DVD drives, just in case. I'm not confident that I'm at the point that I can do w/o an optical drive and just an internet connection.
Yeah, unfortunately we do. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Our deployment is all network based. It means that a lab full of machines can be reinstalled at the same time. Deploying a new iamge for an upgrade takes about 10 mins (including the walk around the room to reset each machine and change bios to netboot). I like our IT department - they do nice things.
When students visit me with work it is rare for them to even bring usb, normally it is sitting on dropbox or onecloud. Installing single one-off machines was the last use that I had for opticals, but now usbboo
Linux ISO discs... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
It's kind of shocking and bizarre that this is still the case. It's got better in the last few years. It used to be REALLY hit and miss. These days, USB usually works. But still not always for some perverse reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I find it easier to burn the iso sometimes too. And some BIOSes are picky about the USB boot media; I have a couple of 1GB sticks I keep around for those times I don't feel like hooking up an external DVD to whatever I'm booting. I've had issues with larger sticks.
So I still get my desktop machines with a dvd. Laptops I don't care one way or the other.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like operator error. What problem are you having? Hell you can even get dd for windows if you want.
secure boot / UEFI isses based on format GTP / MBR (Score:2)
secure boot / UEFI isses based on format GTP / MBR can come up with usb boot and it can very system to system
In related news, (Score:2)
I just bought a used pair of CD players for 250 bucks a pop.
Re: (Score:2)
a PAIR of cd players?
did each one have exactly one channel broken? what are the chances of that happening?
Re:In related news, (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Right, I forgot that audio CDs aren't optical media. Good catch.
All the time (Score:2)
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.
Yes, for now... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Argh... accidentally deleted a word.
"games on disc that I never bought ." should have been "games on disc that I I never bought digitally."
Only for short-term stuff (Score:2)
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.
disposable media (Score:5, Informative)
All the time, as disposable media. Give some data to someone, don't care if you get the disc back.
Re: (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not Really (Score:2)
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/app
I don't know about "Archival" grade or not, but... (Score:2)
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.
Not for backup, but yes for music and video (Score:2)
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. (Opp
Yep, I still wear my glasses (Score:2)
The Spare Tire Of Computing? (Score:2)
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
Great for backup (Score:2)
I do on occasion.... (Score:2)
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 Ama
Re: (Score:2)
My post gives me an idea... Maybe some one knows if something like this already exists... Could a boot CD be made that has a list of Linux repo's that have all the different distro's (or even self updates said list) where it could just install what ever the latest distro is for all the most popular flavors?
I ask because I am currently working on a couple of laptops, and I just had to burn like 6 disks (3 CD's and 3 DVD's) I mean they will be good for a long time. But it seems to me like 1 disk with what I a
DVD media should last for years (Score:2)
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.
No (Score:2)
Subject says it all.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because optical is READ ONLY. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Unless someone starts producing USB flash drives that have a hardware write protect switch that can't be countermanded by software
Those already exist.
Car stereo (Score:2)
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.
I have a spindle of 100 blank DVD-R discs (Score:2)
Yard Sales (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Used to but haven't in a few years due to USB (Score:2)
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
100 MB is more than enough for anyone. (Score:2)
I distribute community event videos on DVD (Score:2)
And about 1.44 disks? (Score:2)
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.
In my car (Score:2)
Building a huge-- and legal-- music collection. (Score:2)
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
Still use it to distribute photographs... (Score:2)
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.
I still use the crap out of it. (Score:2)
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
This is not a new issue (Score:3)
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.
Van with a DVD player (Score:2)
Media and taxes (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
February or so... (Score:2)
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 sec
Options are optional. (Score:2)
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
Don't dismiss WORM media yet (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Which of course begs the question: is that relevant to this discussion?
Re: (Score:2)
Since at least 2003 ish for me. As soon as those "Replace your DVD drive" things came out for my MacBook Pro I got one and had 2 hard drives. The same goes for any other machine I buy that insists I have a DVD drive.
For backups it's Tape.