My biggest concern with Optical Disks is obsolescence and convenience. I bought some DVD media to do some backups but so far I have only backed up a portion of my photos. Right now my files are being stored on my MacBook's internal SSD, Backblaze, Google Drive, and a Time Machine backup on an SD card that stays in the SD slot. I do full backups to external hard drives every so often. I'm too lazy for any backup method that requires an involved process like optical media.
And I also find myself asking if it's even worth it. I don't think my files are that valuable, to be honest. I would be sad to lose them, but it might also be freeing in a minimalist sort of way.
The Reliability of Optical Disks
81–90 of 116 posts
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brand? Treatment? I just grabbed one from my DJ days: TDK dated 1997-01-01: https://imgur.com/a/I7fokrx Listening to it now. We are… family ♪♫♪
After '00, the market was flooded with cheap discs.. Most of the bad ones were those.
I see. My DVDs were also fine, but I did stick to known brands, if memory holds.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#83I had a different experience. A good fraction of the CD/DVDs burned 10-20 years ago won’t read. At least not trivially.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#84RO media is great, especially when you're concerned about data integrity and may not completely trust a machine writing or verifying the media. Consider you're downloading sensitive data from the internet, or just writing sensitive data on an internet connected machine (maybe it's OS installation media, or important legal or financial docs, or you're a wall street or NSA whistleblower, or it's a Bitcoin key backup), and you're worried your machine may be compromised on account of it being connected to the internet; you may not want to stake the quality of the rest of your life on your computer not lying to you about file integrity.
What do you do?
Write it to RO media and take it to different computers to verify the checksum/signature. You don't need to worry about other machines, which are also potentially compromised, corrupting the data. You also don't have to worry about something like BadUSB, where the USB device's microprocessor firmware infects the host machine (or vice versa) before the data payload is even read. This means you can put the disk in your secure airgapped machine at home, even after it's been in the machine at the local library. You create a concensus of file integrity after reading and verifying the data across a range of machines.
Obviously there are other attack vectors, but with the cost of these sorts of attacks (badUSB, or simply getting rooted) going down, the accessibility going up, and the potential rewards becoming more valuable and widespread, it's an attack vector to consider for important data.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#85What do you people need to store so much for so long? Backups are rolled-over ever few days. Personal photos and videos?
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#86I have many degraded CDs and DVDs from 2000-2010. No drive would read them. Most from reputable brands. Most non-RW. All stored in dark places, indoors.
I have many degraded CDs from 1998-2010. In 2019 almost all of them would read, eventually, even as metal flakes came off the disks. I recovered most data from most. My CD-Rs were a mix of brands, nothing special or expensive. But my CD-drives are old too, from 2006(?) or so. I wonder if like with floppy disks and drives, modern CD drives are less capable than old ones because they're no longer a premium product?
How did you recover the data from CD/DVDs? I checked at a local shop they are not interested in recovering CDs.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many people are buying these 128GB discs? Probably not a whole lot and that is the reason why nobody’s going to make the investment to create bigger discs. If you want huge local offline storage, the solution is tapes.
But it is already known that magnetic tape is much less reliable in long term storage. The author is looking for long-term reliability, not just huge local offline storage.
It is not known what the durability is for an optical disc format that does not exist. There is no optical disc format that stores the required amount of data.
LTO tapes do store the required amount of data and if you want them to last extremely long you should make new copies every 10 years or so. Just like you should for optical media. Sure, some discs might last 50 years. But some others won’t be readable after 15.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#88If I am looking at a ~100 years timescale for preservation of documents, there are exactly two choices that I would consider. At the hundreds of years timescale, exactly one. Those are, in order: 1. Microfilm/microfiche 2. Ink on 100% cotton paper, or ink on vellum The properties of microfilm have been well studied. It requires no technology other than a magnifying glass to read, has a well over 500 year lifespan in…
How about building a pyramid with carvings on the inside? I bet that would last. You could even encode data by the presence or absence of a pyramid
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#89When I was in grad school back in the '80s, 9 track magtapes were the standard for lots of things: backups and long term storage being some of them. (I still have one or two tapes in a box somewhere.)
About 10-15 years ago, it dawned on me that I hadn't seen a working tape drive in quite a while. Any tapes, even if the media were intact (highly doubtful, and the point of the parent article) would not be readable.
Much the same comment for boxes of punch cards. (My late colleague used to tear off pieces of the cards and use them for "filters" in his roll-your-own cigarettes.)
I guess my point is, even if the media are reliable (holes in cardboard? pretty foolproof from an ink-on-vellum viewpoint) the entire surrounding ecosystem needs to survive for archival purposes.
Re: The Reliability of Optical Disks
#90Not very actively maintained these days but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster stores error correction codes in the remaining space on an optical disk, without affecting its readability by unaware systems.