do you still use optical drives?

[coppercone2]

What are your thoughts on optical drives in this day and age?

[David Hess]

Since they are more reliable than USB Flash, yes.  I can store burned CDs or DVDs in a box for a decade and know that they will still be readable where any common USB Flash device will have died due to lack of retention.  It does not have to be that way but how do you tell which Flash memory devices will hold data for decades and which will not?

[hamster_nz]

Nope. Not for ages. All offline data is on external USB HDDs, and all OS installs via bootable USB stick. .

For everything else there is the Internet...

Have not burnt a CD/DVD in maybe 5 years

[coppercone2]

is there a integrity test that can be performed on optical media rather then just relying on hearsay on which storage is best for blu-ray, dvd, etc?

(analog parameter scan)

[Jeroen3]

CD-R's are perishable. About 10 years before they have too many bit errors.

[mansaxel]

I do use them, but only occasionally. The WORM nature of CDR is highly desirable when you are dealing with security requirements that mandate a high degree of verification that only reading and no writing takes place later in the chain. This is in situations where a network has been ruled out and we're creating what basically is a high-bandwidth, high-latency sneakernet to computers whose only CD reader is under lock and key.

Personally I keep PATA/SATA DVD burners, a couple Plextor SCSI CD readers  and a few USB floppy drives around, but they are collecting dust. It's much easier to have a usable network-transparent file system[0]. I would like to descend into 5 1/4" floppies (I've got at least one motherboard that is old enough to have a floppy controller) to read off a few remaining backups from my DOS days. I'm not hoping for much success, though.



[ 0 ] : I am running an OpenAFS cell, an enterprise-class network file system that ticks most but not all boxes. It sucks, at times, but still is orders of magnitude less sucky than anything else out there.

[Electro Detective]

A finalised burnt DVD or CD (and COPIES) can't be messed with by the OS,
or a confused malware program that nukes any exe file it is unsure or has no clue about 
..including it's own install exe 

EDIT: @ blueskull, good to see you back mate 

[Ampera]

I use optical media for legacy purposes, being a PC collector.

While cold backups have the advantage of not wearing out drives, I believe in what I like to call the hot potato mentality of data retention. In that, the most reliable data backup system is one that is always monitored, always running, and always ready to be repaired with redundancy. At the end of the day, however, how safe your data is, and what plan you should take to ensure it depends on how much money you have (or want to spend) to keep it safe.

I would *not* call burned media reliable long-term. Besides normal bit rot/disc composition issues that plague any optical format, but are usually avoidable with good quality discs, burned discs, even *-ROM's are made from light sensitive dyes which can and will decompose. Tapes tend to hold up better over time, but even they can loose their magnetism. This being why I believe keeping any data on any media over a long period of time is not a good idea.

[legacy]

What are your thoughts on optical drives in this day and age?

CDROMs? yes
DVDRAMs? yes
And also MOs.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

The last time I used a CD may be, perhaps, ten years ago or so. But there's one in the CD player in my car, that my wife put there in 2012, and still works... (Louis Armstrong )

[Black Phoenix]

Yes, because Japanese Anime are sold in Blu-Ray discs.

Exactly. In Japan CD/DVD still is very strong. Most Anime's have BD-ROM releases and it's common for a Tankōbon (book who accumulates chapters released of a single manga title instead of the magazine that includes single chapters of various manga titles) to include a CD audio, being music or a drama CD or even DVD video with a OVA or a OAD episodes not released in the original TV Anime run.

Also common for special editions of games with soundtracks in CD-Audio, and Soundtracks of games being sold also in the same format (very common with Japanese Studio Games, not so much with Western ones). So yes, at least in Japan the CD/DVD/BDRay is not going to go away very soon.

Regarding me, last time I used a CD drive was today. I have a USB CD/DVD and a USB FDD just in case is needed for any reason.

[eugenenine]

Last new laptop I bought was in 2002 and the Dell salesdroid tried to talk me into a different model because the C400 didn't have any removable media bays.  I told him that was fine because I never used either.  Since then I've always bought 'refurbished' laptops that were thin and light and don't have any removable media drives.  I have one external dvd/bluray burner for just in case but can't remember the last time I've used it.
So I'm close to two decades without having a cd/dvd drive on any of my systems

[SiliconWizard]

Optical drives: rarely these days.

My backups are multiple, mostly on external USB drives and on a NAS I built a few years ago (which has conventional WD HDDs in RAID-5). I occasionally also write backups on DVDs (but very rarely) once in a while for critical stuff. Just in case. Or when I need to share critical data without making it transit through any network.

[SilverSolder]

BluRay quality still blows away streaming video.

I still have a 6 CD changer in the car, which I feed with CD/RW discs in large quantities. 

I kind of enjoy making CDs, because the "playlist" is not that long, it forces me to be more selective!  - and reminds me of making party tapes in the old days (reel and cassette)...

[Ice-Tea]

I have a 500CD music collection. Which I never use anymore. My current car actually has a CD player (in the glove compartment) so I was kinda looking forward to be playing old fashioned discs again. But the noise floir of the setup is several orders of magnitude worse than unacceptable.

So, yeah, no.

[David Hess]

Nope. Not for ages. All offline data is on external USB HDDs, and all OS installs via bootable USB stick. .

Shelf life for hard drives can be a problem past 5 or 10 years.  Older drives seem to do better.  It is difficult to know which batches of drives will last; some of my old drives have gone 20 years and are still going, some failed or became questionable at 10 years, and some more recent ones, 1TB and larger, failed before 5.  Powered RAID backups where the drives can be scrubbed are a different matter as long as the data can be migrated if necessary.

is there a integrity test that can be performed on optical media rather then just relying on hearsay on which storage is best for blu-ray, dvd, etc?

Some CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives can read back the low level error correction data to show the number of bits corrected inside each sector at each level.  This provides an easy way to compare media from different manufacturers and over time if necessary.  Lower quality recordable disks have a markedly higher error rate when tested this way immediately after burning and at least in my experience, degrade over a period of months to years.

I like DVDs because the recorded layer is sandwiched inside two layers of polycarbonate so should be better protected physically but I may switch to Blu-ray for larger capacity at some point.  Another option is DVD and Blu-ray archival media like M-Disc which uses ablation instead of a dye.

I also include PAR2 files on DVD backups in case the DVD gets damaged which has happened a couple times.

CD-R's are perishable. About 10 years before they have too many bit errors.

I have not had any CD-Rs fail yet which were not initially bad.

And also MOs.

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

[Siwastaja]

CD-R(W), DVD+/-R(W) have/had the exact same problem as the flash drives: some have sucky data retention measured in years, not even a decade. So you need to: A) buy disks/flash drives that specify data retention, B) be able to trust this number.

Storage conditions are important, as well.

[Veteran68]

I still have 2 drawers full of optical media, including double-sided BluRay, and I've kept 2 BD-R/W recorders in my main desktop (I don't buy desktops, I just upgrade mobo/CPU/RAM/video every so often, and keep most of my drives and peripherals). But I don't recall the last time I burned a disc of anything.

I invested pretty heavily in BD-RW media thinking I'd use it for backup, but with magnetic and solid-state drives and cloud storage becoming so prevalent, my interest waned pretty quickly. I have a 20TB NAS appliance on my home network, multiple multi-TB external drives, and terabytes of cloud storage at my fingertips without resorting to manual manipulation of a slow and fairly limited (even at 50G or 100G) storage media. Anything I'd hate to lose is kept in multiple places, so I really have no use for it.

I haven't had a laptop with an optical drive in years. I keep a couple of external USB optical drives (one at home, one at work) just in case I get the odd disc of something I need to install or view, but that's exceedingly rare these days. Again, can't remember the last time I needed one. I never install software or read a manual from disc if I can get it online, because it's almost always newer.

[David Hess]

So you need to: A) buy disks/flash drives that specify data retention, B) be able to trust this number.

Flash or disk of unusual retention?  I do not think they exist.

[ferdieCX]

I backup closed projects and documents on DVD-RAM + a USB stick devoted only to that.
I still have a MO drive, where I also put another copy of really important things
The Install disk of CentOS is on DVD-RW
CDs are used for music

[free_electron]

Since they are more reliable than USB Flash, yes.  I can store burned CDs or DVDs in a box for a decade and know that they will still be readable where any common USB Flash device will have died due to lack of retention.  It does not have to be that way but how do you tell which Flash memory devices will hold data for decades and which will not?

pray tell what brands of media ?

my imation and HP disks start discoloring very badly after 3 to 4 years ... 
i used to have Traxdata gold disks and kodak gold disks. I still have some aroudn that were burned using Kodaks external SCSI single speed burner. Like over 20 yeara ago. those are still perfectly readable.
The newer ones ? total and utter crap. leave one in the sun for a few weeks and it's corrupted. The golden ones did not suffer from that problem.

[Veteran68]

Higher quality or "archive" quality discs will survive longer, but all optical media is subject to "bit rot" over time due to degradation of the dyes used. Given an archival scenario where data is written and the media is put away for safekeeping (as opposed to constantly being re-written), I would trust a flash device to survive way longer than any optical media.

[Rick Law]

What are your thoughts on optical drives in this day and age?

It would appear that for medical imaging, CD is still the standard (in the USA, or at least near where I am).

I recently had the experience of getting hospital CAT-Scan result to a medical imaging place, they did newer and targeted ultra sound.  Another (not ultra-sound, not CT) was done and it was also CD.  I had to get those back to the doctor.  All exchanges were done via CD.  They have equipment that dump stuff directly on to a CD with patient details printed directly on the CD.

[james_s]

I still use an external one frequently. I buy used CDs and rip them instead of buying digital downloads, it's cheaper and it gives me real, lossless media with no DRM.

I also burn CDs to listen to in one of my cars that has a vintage CD player that I really like, it has a nice clean look that fits in nicely in the '84 car, most head units are flashy and look out of place in an old car.

I use CDs and DVDs as backup media too, once written I know the data will not change or get infected or corrupted as long as the disc holds up. I have some 20+ year old CD-Rs that are still readable although generally I would not trust them to last that long. Realistically a few years is fine, I can copy critical files to new media if I need to.

[richnormand]

Yes.
Include fresh installs for various OS and tools.
Stuff I do not want modified without a trace and "sort of permanent" with write once formatting.

[excitedbox]

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

[BravoV]

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

Most of my archives on discs were protected with QuickPar.

[legacy]

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

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

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

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



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

[MyHeadHz]

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

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

[Halcyon]

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

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

[rdl]

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

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

[legacy]

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

What about DVDRams?

[chickenHeadKnob]

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

[Veteran68]

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

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

[david77]

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

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

[Rerouter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[David Hess]

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

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

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

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

[coppercone2]

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

[BravoV]

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

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

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




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

[coppercone2]

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

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

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




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

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

[David Hess]

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

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

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

[Towger]

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

[Rick Law]

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

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

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

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

[David Hess]

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

[coppercone2]

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

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

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

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

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