Work with medical data in Germany and you’ll burn CDs every day, probably for the next 50 years.
I’m baffled at how many people here still burn cds…
I thought that I burned my last cd a long time ago until my uni required me to hand in my thesis on a cd.
Buying a 4-pack of CDs (with cases) was more expensive than buying a 128gb sd card.
I burnt about 100 disks last year as an offsite, nuclear resistant backup… though, if nuclear war broke out, that would be the least of my worries
Even if nuclear war breaks out, at least the bank will still have records of how much we still owe them :)
Mdisks are a viable offline long term backup solution, and cheaper to get started with than tape drives.
I burned an audio CD just a few weeks ago. My car doesn’t have Bluetooth audio, so I’ve kept going old school all along. I bought a few stacks of empty CD-R’s and DVD-R’s when the stores wanted to get rid of them.
I have zero streaming subscriptions and no intention of getting any. The number of films, games and music albums I’ve bought from flea markets and second hand stores during the past 10 years has to be in the hundreds. And not one has cost more than 3$.
Even my kids haven’t complained about the lack of streaming, they seem perfectly happy using my physical media library.
i sure was fucking hoping it was though
We should go back to doing it, physical media is where it’s at.
Physical media yes, CDs or DVDs no. Most discs I burned are probably unreadable by now. I remember my favorite artist explaining how he probably had to stop making music because it just wasn’t financially viable. So I decided to buy all his albums (I had all the albums in mp3 format for years). Its about 10 years later, all the CDs are lost or destroyed (most in my car). I still have a NAS with the original mp3s I downloaded 20 years ago.
Yeah, I burned 100s of music cds as well about 20 years ago, and stored them in those books with slots. They weren’t stored in a car, but still about a quart of them doesn’t play anymore, and I am sure it won’t be long before none of them will. All my store bought cds of the same age or older still works fine though.
Homeburning is not a good physical media alternative.
Homeburning can be surprisingly robust as a backup method, and as an option of physical media, but I’d still keep backups on an actual NAS as well. There’s also a ton of variables that affect the lifetime of a burnt CD, like dyes used (cyanine - phthalocyanine - azo), lamination quality, storage and the burner used. Especially the quality and intensity of the build has a surprisingly strong effect, despite things being set in a standard – you can get a lot more storage life out of a CD burned using a quality 5.25" burner compared to a budget slim drive.
Also early discs based on cyanine had a notoriously short shelf life compared to the later archival quality discs, around 30 years or so in optimal conditions (and typically a lot less), so much of the stuff burnt in 90’s and 00’s has already began deteriorating. More recent quality discs can last over a century if stored properly, but the older ones can’t.
DVDs can also often have issues with delamination, meaning that especially the outer rim of the disc can start exhibiting bit rot quite early if you’re using low quality media. I’ve noticed even new discs having signs of early delamination between the two disc halves (DVDs have the data layer in between two acrylic discs, unlike CDs which have it on the backside directly under the reflective coating). I’ve also experienced a lot of issues when burning multilayer DVDs that might affect how long they last in storage, so for actual backups I’d prefer using a single layer disc instead.
But as per reasons for still using discs – they’re an unparalleled cold storage solution. With proper care you can actually leave them be for decades and be sure the data is still readable, unlike with SSDs which will lose their data when unpowered for a long period of time. Tape is a good option, but not really viable for consumers – also tape needs more active upkeep, since you typically have to copy over the old data to new media every 20-30 years or so (promised life in archival is 30 years, after which it might not be possible to get new drives for reading the tapes). Optical is also king when you need to transfer data into air-gapped environments, since with optical media it’s relatively easy to audit that what’s burned to the disc is unalterable. There’s a reason why I still keep a full install set of Debian handy.
It was a CD rw and didn’t actually work. The data wasn’t there.
Occasionally break out the burner, it’s just very rare. Plus these days it’s a portable little usb drive.
That’s sad but true, man. Miss you “Car Rock VI”.
June 13th, 2022. 7:13pm. If that’s the last one I burn, I will at least know when. It was Windows XP Media Center 2005, for my fleamarket Dell Demension E510. Well, more accurately, an E310 with a E510 motherboard.
There are plenty of people who never did that at all.
Jokes on you, I’ve never burned a CD
Jokes on you, I still burn my acquired digital media to BluRay discs
Disk rot is like 25 years while an SSD still doesn’t have that kind of shelf life
Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can’t get my mind around it.
