I was browsing a technical store’s website and came across some DVDs. On sale. You’d need an optical drive to use them, unless you use them to decorate your walls
If you do use them, what do you use them for and why do you not just use hard drives, SSDs or USB thumb drives instead?
This is not a hate post. My whole existence is living in the 90’s, so… :P
I mentioned it to my partner the other day but medical contraceptive packaging looks remarkably similar to how storage media was packaged in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Take the logos off and play a game of DVDs or Plan B?
Sure! First prize: a cracked Grand Theft Auto 3 Second prize: strawberry flavored
I still have some and I burned music on them.
Backing up my movie collection to hard copies mostly. I also make mix cds for my friends if i find out they sill use cds. I got an external read/write drive in 8th grade and its still kicking butt. I also have a 360 on my retro shelf, but i mostly just use the external drive or local files.
You are a gold mine to your friends! :D
Yes, I use them to store data that I just need to read. I also rip my DVDs
BD-Rs for cold storage, they are cheaper than HDDs/SSDs and offer a fast solution to clear up space from existing hot storage without actually getting rid of the data. USB sticks are not suitable for archival, they degrade very soon.
And they also easily become bricked and unusable… Discs definitely are reliable. :)
Yep, I’m using m-discs blu ray for storage of some of my data because I’m afraid of bit flips that I can’t detect. I had this happen already with images that got destroyed without me noticing.
Too bad they are on the way out…
I have a small library of music CDs, because I liked music before there was an internet. I recently ripped them to .FLACC.
I keep meaning to do this, but do I really want to buy a dvd reader just to try to rip all my older music and movies that I seem to be getting along without?
Actually, a more likely reason is baby pictures. My mom was trying to be forward thinking and sent copies of all the pictures she took of my kids on cd-r or Kodak picture disk. Those are more important
I use them to burn DVD’s that I can play on my PS5. I rip discs more than I burn them but sometimes I’ll make a copy of a rare disc or an .iso I found online.
What’s your latest rare find that you made a copy of? :D
Some obscure South African CD’s that no one outside SA knows about. I have a strange fascination with South African rock music.
No, and I no longer have any optical disk readers. My last disk reader was on an XBOne and that’s long gone
I used optical disks almost entirely for music and video content but gave up once convenience of streaming media caught up. The thing is I don’t care about owning any. If don’t really have music or movies I like listening/watching over and over so buying doesn’t make sense. My comparison to streaming is broadcast. I’m paying $20/mon for essentially radio but without the inane chatter, ads, and unrelenting repeat of pop music.
Edit: in response to another comment - even for operating systems, I have gigabit fiber so download it as needed whenever possible
I had never even heard of radio subscriptions before. :O
Fuck bud I still use floppy disks. It’s damn hard to find a pc with a dedicated floppy drive. Those usb floppy drives fail writing to floppy more often than not.
I have a desktop floppy drive with a USB adapter. It seems to do the job.
Cool! Are floppys still being manufactured? I’d love to make a rescue boot floppy for when I need to do maintenance on my system!
They are not being manufactured anymore but it is still possible to buy new old stock. One guy is trying to keep them in circulation (he owns floppydisk.com) and I found a somewhat recent article that has some good info as well: https://www.raconteur.net/technology/the-floppygeddon-cometh
Yeah I kina lucked out I found a 10 pack of new ones on Amazon about 2 years ago. And recently, while cleaning out an old auto performance shop, there was like 2 or 3 55gal drums full of used and new floppy disks.
Also more recently there was something about Japan finaly upgrading their i.t infrastructure from floppy disks to more modern tech.
Hell apparently they still make cassette tapes for use in prisons because you can’t make a shank out of one with the materials they use for them.
And you did not share that loot of floppys with the rest of the world? D:
The inmates at the prison that I was working at all had off brand CD Walkmans.
I thought about it. But I all belonged to a dead guy. And I thought to my self. This is cool and all and I can nit pick through this load of stuff yes But he is dead and I’m alive. And this stuff didn’t do him any good in the end. So I’d rather not waste my time.
I did find this though funny enough there is an archive online of all the contents in it
Casettes are being reintroduced in the (indie) music industry as well
Yeah it’s really bizarre seeing my teen get excited about buying cassettes and vinyl
I started buying CDs from Japan and on the used market (thank god discogs).
Pretty weird :D
Offsite Backups of Family Photos
Your descendants will thank you! :D
If they can find an optical drive.
I used to have one of those little joke .exe files called Cupholder. If you clicked on it, it opened the CD drive.
😂 legendary
We have a spindle of CD-Rs. I wish it was DVDs! We’d have a use for DVDs! It’s WAY easier to just burn a Linux ISO than it is to faff about with a USB stick. Less convoluted to boot from, too (hybrid ISOs are a bit cursed; it doesn’t matter if you’re doing the usual pure “overwrite the entire stick” thing, but it’s not great if you’re also using the drive for other stuff – that’s not an issue with DVD[-+]Rs, they come in packs and each individual disc is cheap enough it’s one disc per thing).
Wee do have a couple OpenBSD install CDs. We don’t use them enough to be super useful. But a Debian install DVD? I’d use that.
– Frost
I use them for archival backups of personal media.
Sweet! I still haven’t started doing offsite physical backups. I do have backups locally and encrypted in a third party cloud, but no physical copies…
And why do you prefer this over USB sticks (thar are dirt cheap nowadays)?
A CD-R will retain data longer than a USB stick.
USB sticks don’t last as long
Mostly because I already have a burner and two 75-count spindles of blank DVDs.
I have a stack of blank CD-Rs. I mostly bought them for running homebrew and import games on my Dreamcast. Recently I did find some old PC games that wouldn’t work under WINE, so I ended up using some of the CD-Rs to reinstall Windows XP on my Thinkpad T60. That took 8 discs.
Holy shit this comment unlocked stuff in me. You can’t just carelessly throw around terms like “Dreamcast”, " Windows XP" and “that took 8 discs”.
physical media has a place with collectors and appreciators and i hope that doesn’t ever stop being true
its resistant to censorship and it gives creators a thing that supporters can buy
Tru.
