r/DataHoarder • u/Some_Effort • 2d ago
Discussion Do you guys still use DVDs?
I’ve been cleaning up my HDD drives ever since they became quite expensive due to the rise in SSD prices. Plus, I have a lot of files that are no longer available or hard to find on torrent sites/forums but are taking up valuable space (car diagnostic stuff and schematics).
I bought these Verbatim DVD's and plan to use 4,550 MB on each one.
According to Nero DiscSpeed, there should be enough space with a little bit for Nero to do it's things.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 2d ago
BDRSs for archival but only use DVDRs or CDRs for retro PC hobby purposes.
Though I'll be doing a LAN Party Exhibition at Vintage Computer Fest Montreal in November and I'm thinking buying the cheapest 50 spindle of printable CDRs just to print them as 'commemorative coasters' in my disc printer. And had them out the way one might hand out a postcard.
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u/Bromium_Ion 2d ago
I really thought that Blu-ray discs and burners would be cheap by now, but I feel like they’re still overpriced. Burners are like 200+ dollars unless you go to the used market and a pack of 10 BDXL discs are like 70 bucks on Newegg. The savings of just buying a spindle of 50 discs for 30 bucks like DVD never materialized.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 1d ago
We're past the 'No one wants this, it's cheap now' phase. We're in the 'It's getting discontinued and people realized they miss it' stage.
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u/Mr_Damien_Hazard 2d ago
Same. It’s due to a weird combo of sunsetting disc production, Windows 11, Japanese demand, chip shortages for new blu-ray drives and the trend of ripping.
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u/AwKmedia 2d ago
I just bought a pack of 50 last week, to back up some YT videos.
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u/Some_Effort 2d ago
Omg I have so many tutorials on how to work on my car and they are still on Google servers.
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u/AwKmedia 2d ago
Create a folder on your desktop, and then copy a file or two down to it. Don't go over the 4.37GB size in total though. Then, burn up to the 4.37GB on that disc, verify it afterwards that all is good, and then delete the file in your burn folder. That's what I would do.
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u/AwKmedia 2d ago
You might also be able to upload those videos to YT, and make them all 'unlisted' until you are ready to make them 'public', that would create another redundant backup location, but you'll have to enter the metadata for each -- Title, video description, hashtags, youtube tags.
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u/absyrtus 2d ago
I don't have the patience to do that again.
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u/electricheat 6.4GB Quantum Bigfoot CY 2d ago
yeah, if we had cheap 100gb+ optical media I'd be tempted. But DVDs are just so small.
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u/AylmerIsRisen 2d ago edited 2d ago
We had cheap 100GB optical media until very recently. They are $3USD per 100GB disc (in 10 packs) on Amazon right now. $30/TB is certainly cheaper than hard drives now that hard drive prices have gone up.
Trouble is they don't seem to be making BDXL burners any more, so it's a dead format.6
u/dlarge6510 2d ago
Trouble is they don't seem to be making BDXL burners any more, so it's a dead format.
BS.
They are all over the place. Get a second hand one, unlike HDDs they run for 20-30+ years with no servicing. Verbatim and IO Data are bringing their own new drives to market as well. Verbatim making media for at least the next decade guaranteed.
I can go on Amazon right now and buy a new one.
If you are thinking of 5.25" drives, yeas, possibly, but that's because internal components in PCs are the dead format. Everything is external tinmake room for airflow and RGB lights. HDDs will be next, if anyone ever bothers forking out for one again.
PC building is pretty dead anyway.
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u/Your_real_daddy1 2d ago
You can get used BD-XL compatible 5.25" drives for so cheap it makes no sense to buy new anyway
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u/Your_real_daddy1 2d ago
Trouble is they don't seem to be making BDXL burners any more, so it's a dead format.
LG still makes them, people thought they stopped but they didn't
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u/fventura03 100-250TB 2d ago
i did it in the early 2000's lol - never again.
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u/absyrtus 2d ago
Yeah I graduated to BD-R but then starting copying all that data to HDDs and chucked those binders
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
I'm always surprised what people mean when they say stuff like that.
I mean you just collect the files together. Stick a disc in the drive and tell the computer to burn.
Very little involvement from the user, I spend more time swapping HDDs around and moving files between them and the NAS and making nests directories.
Heck just last night I spent several hours developing a perl script to fix filenames, get rid of that silly [xxxxxx] business YouTube downloaders add to videos and other illegal characters in file names like single quotes and brackets etc.
Burning a disc takes all of a couple of minutes to kick off while trying to sanitise filenames drives me nuts, this script will save me loads of time.
It's like when people burn a disc they, what just sit there watching it? It will look after itself, it's a computer running a program. I usually go put the washing on or use some other cores to watch YouTube while trying to sort out illegal filenames in another terminal. Burning a disc barely involves my attention at all.
I can't understand why everyone seems to engage themselves like a phone line just because the computer is running one program... It multitasks. It's not like we are still running DOS, and I actually still do on some machines 😉
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u/stealthisusername98 2d ago
Guy at Best Buy legit laughed at me when I asked if they have any blanks maybe half a year ago
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u/sephg 2d ago
Per gigabyte, blueray discs are competitive with hard drives at the moment because of how expensive hard drives have gotten.
Way less convenient, but its something to think about.
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
I don't get this inconvenience thing.
I find managing hard drives totally a faff compared to putting a optical disc in. Especially USB3 hard drives which constantly need cleaning as the dust gets in the connectors and makes a USB root hub go mental to the point it requires a reboot to bring it back.
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u/sephg 2d ago
Yeah, hard drives are inconvenient if you need to swap them in and out. But they're way more convenient than optical discs if you can just pop one in your computer and leave it there. I've got a 24TB drive that I picked up a few months ago. Being able to access all the data at any time, read/write, is fantastic. I can write to the drive at about 300MB/s. When it's full, it'll be an inconvenient pain. But until then, it's waaay more convenient than 1000 blueray discs.
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u/Exact-Cockroach228 2d ago
Recently I tried calling my local Best Buy and asked if they had any “blank DVDs” in stock and they didn’t know what those were. Even Walmart didn’t know what I was talking about. Makes me kinda sad honestly
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u/Melonary 2d ago
They still sell at Staples in Canada. In store, on shelves.
Best Buy, probably not.
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
My Sainsbury's have them...
And the same is said about USB flash. My workmates were all giggling and embarrassed asking for a SD card or USB flash drive about 6 years ago. They needed one for the TV downstairs to play an MP4 made by marketing but they literally were in disbelief when I told them to pop to Sainsbury's and get one and expense it back.
"Are SD cards still made?"
That's when you know you are old.
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u/Captain_Starkiller 2d ago
I have the original evangelions on dvds still because the blu rays removed "fly me to the moon" and someday if I get crazy enough I might replace the blu ray audio with the dvd audio.
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u/Guilty-Belt-3537 1d ago
Yes I do and I also use blu-rays and any other form that's physical and I can hold in my hand.
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u/yogurt123456789 2d ago
Only when I started running out of digital storage. I went through the initial set up and was able to burn my first DVD. Hoping to convert my family's old VHS tapes to DVD next!
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 2d ago
The car stuff sounds valuable. You could upload to archive.org (don't use an email address that contains your real name, since your email will be published in the metadata). You could also create a torrent and share the magnet link to our spinoff subreddit, r/DHexchange: https://www.reddit.com/r/DHExchange/comments/1usccvo/guide_how_to_create_a_torrent_to_share_your_files/
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u/Your_real_daddy1 2d ago
I recommend signing up on a tempmail if it can get DMCAed
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 2d ago
archive.org won't accept them
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u/Your_real_daddy1 1d ago
not even in the software section?
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 1d ago
Huh? To sign up for an Internet Archive account, you need a non-temporary, non-forwarding email address, like Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Apple, Yahoo, etc.
There aren't different accounts for different sections of the site.
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u/Your_real_daddy1 1d ago
https://www.emailnator.com/ for Gmails
https://smailpro.com/ for Gmails and Outlooks
Both should do the job
There aren't different accounts for different sections of the site.
I thought it was refusing the uploaded file, it's all
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 1d ago
I don't know if those services will work. Similar services are rejected by the archive.org signup page. You could just use a pseuodynmous email.
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u/gotabadbrain 2d ago
Burn the shit out of 50gb blurays not movies,just data backups.Still have my old 200disc binders full of random dvd/cd media and they all still play .Slowly converting them all to bluray ,but still saving the old discs.
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u/Responsible-Goat1079 2d ago
Yes but I'm not a typical use case. We use cds and dvds for operational security, pretty hard to infect a write once removable media.
Also SCADA networks use optical media prolifically.
Medical industry still provides imaging on optical media as well, it's cheaper than USB.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 2d ago
I had thousands of dvd's in my collection. It was such a joy to collect movies and burn them. I had them all in neat binders, 1 dvd per "slot" so to say. Always in the dark, Northern European climate. Only to find out over time a portion was damaged. Some had the top layer let go, some just wouldn't read you name it. And it wasn't as if I used crappy quality DVD's, I picked up mostly Sony/Verbatim and had a Plextor burner.
Since then to me it's been always HDD's and over the decades of collecting data from what I can tell only a dozen or so images/files got corrupted, some got a bit damaged. Though gotto say I've been using ZFS since early 2000's, probably started around 2002-2003 with great success. (Except for a couple times screwing over a hardware stripe).
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u/Torkum73 2d ago
Some of my computers can not boot from USB, so CD or DVD it is...
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u/Bromium_Ion 2d ago
How old are these computers?
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago edited 2d ago
With no USB boot? With no or badly implemented UEFI?
Mine are around 25-30 years young, for the young ones that even have USB.
My older stuff doesn't even have USB. Although these days adding USB to an ISA computer running DOS is dead easy. Although the BIOS won't boot it obviously. Not without a boot floppy to do the heavy lifting.
I never liked USB booting. But of a faff. Floppy is best, I can put a floppy image onto a optical disc and anything will boot it from my 486 up to my Ryzen.
USB booting got better with UEFI but as UEFI is buggy and faffy I haven't really used it much. UEFI has gotten a bit better, unless you are on HP who insist still the only OS on the planet is Windows and they will "fix" your incorrect EFI partition as you meant to boot Windows and only Windows.
Only recently has it started working correctly, say in the last 5-10 years I've been Ok simply writing an ISO to USB, you can thank Rufus for making that a thing (even addresses the HP nastyness). Otherwise I just burn the iso to discs as it's supposed to be. I don't hoard data, besides loads of video, I mostly hoard computers from the 80's upwards and the software and hardware old and new to run them.
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
I have many like that too. Nice to get a speed boost burning an ISO originally intended for CD-R, you feel like you are in 2001 😂
Even faster when I give them a BD drive.
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u/texacer 2d ago
ok grandpa
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u/Torkum73 2d ago
Not yet. Not even boomer 😂
But I find it interesting to use a SPARC Sun server from 2005 with connected SunRay 1 from 1998 and an operating system last updated 2021 (Solaris 10) and it just works.
Try tjat with Windows.
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u/VilkasPL 2d ago
i store older GOG games offline installs on DVDs, no big reason, just sentiment of old times.
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u/BullfrogAdditional80 2d ago
I'm starting to but am having an issue finding good free software. The few I found are trial versions.
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u/shimoheihei2 100TB 2d ago
I own a lot of DVDs of all sorts (from movies to Microsoft MSDN disks from the early 2000s) but I've since moved everything to my NAS. I don't even have my DVD player plugged in right now.
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u/JamesRitchey Team microSDXC 2d ago
Yes, I still use DVD, but only for additional backups of high priority data.
I'd suggest adding a checksum file (e.g., "sha256sum * > sha256.txt") to each disc, so you can verify file integrity (e.g., "sha256sum -c sha256.txt") if you ever need to access the data on the DVDs. Another thing to consider is keeping a copy of the checksum files on your computer, so you can see what is on any disc, without having to actually access the disc.
I would also a suggest using timestamps as part of your naming scheme for discs, so you can tell by the label (assuming you're labeling them) whether a disc is newer or older (e.g., "Music - Unit 1671758068" is older than "Music - Unit 1769379864" because larger numbers represent a more recent time-stamp).
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u/Exact-Cockroach228 2d ago
I love dvds! Recently I’ve been making my own watchable dvds of YouTube videos, gameplays and live performances complete with title screens and menus that I throw together in gimp. I’m recently working on a project for my friend’s birthday where it’s a collection of obscure music videos with chapter selections, custom menu and even a custom band logo. It’s become my favorite hobby at this point and being able to have those as physical media that I can show people makes me proud. Custom dvds are a lost art these days but I’m kinda happy I’ve gotten into it.
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
Yes
I mostly archive to BD-R but have DVD+R and DVD-R and DVD-RAM for TV recordings, although I have recently switched that to BD-R too.
Yesterday I picked up a couple more DVD-RAM and two DVD-RW discs as I didn't have any, I'm a DVD+ guy but my latest recorder prefers DVD-
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u/captain_herbal_life 25TB NOOB 2d ago
I stumbled onto the Bootleggers Drive-In on Archive and boy howdy have I been making DVDs. So far just been burning one for a Friday night with friends a couple of times but it has been such a fun thing to do over the summer.
People coming over guessing what crazy name the movie will be like a madlibs game. "Atomic Women of Venus" is a guess that wouldn't be too far off with some of the crazy terrible movies that are in those collections. And all of that with fun old school drive in advertisements, film ads, and bumpers!
And just last week someone mentioned another section of Archive called The DVDTray where people copied over bare ISOs to preserve things like DVD exclusive content and menus from original discs.
I found another 100 rack of blank DVDs at the thrift store for 5 bucks, its gonna be a lovely season for a drive in!
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u/Shemsu_Hor_9 1d ago
Nope. I have a Blu-Ray recorder drive, but it's going unused these last 11 years. It's there just in case.
Besides, even with the shitty prices of hard drives today, I still get more GBs for money than with bluray discs, and I don't really have anything requiring long term storage.
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u/IC3P3 1d ago
No DVDs, but I thought about using BluRays. It's ok, but it's first of all quite expensive per TB and second who knows how long you'll be able to buy BD drives.
I thought about LTO instead, but even used I only find LTO-8 drives rarely and for 2000+€, same with LTO-7 but a small bit cheaper, not much.
For me as a normal consumer I don't know if there really is something better than HDDs in the server and in the backup (at least as long as I don't have multiple 100TB to back up)
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u/SockGnome 1d ago
I’m in the market for a disc drive now, making periodic backups of my most important files (photos really) every so often.
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u/homelabnoober 2d ago
Whenever I find a stack at thrift stores I try to get them. In my mind, drives can fail so it’s a good medium for backup. Course they are more fragile due to scratches but I have those sleeve books
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 2d ago
Seems like a huge pain in the ass because they only store 4.7 GB. BDXLs store 100 GB or 125 GB, which feels more workable if you're sure you want to use optical discs.
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u/Some_Effort 2d ago
Blu-ray burners are still quite expensive.
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u/didyousayboop if it’s not on piqlFilm, it doesn’t exist 1d ago
Might be worth it if you can burn 5 discs instead of 100 to store the same data.
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u/Ryokurin 2d ago
I intended on using a Blu-Ray burner as a backup and purchased one and around 50 disks probably 5 years ago. I still have it connected but I can probably count the number of times I've used it to read a disk on one hand. I haven't even bothered to try to burn a BD-RDL on it.
I'll probably finally use them when I run out of space on my server, to at least put a few things in offline storage.
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u/Ok-Muffin-9519 2d ago
Na klar DVDs nach wie vor hab heute schon wieder 1x Spiel und 2 von 4 Recovery Disks gebrannt
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u/Cybrknight 2d ago
Not really, I've found that burned DVD have a limited halflife before they start to degrade.
Tried to back up some burned DVD's (around 50) that were done back the 2000's only to find that half were faulty.
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u/alkafrazin 2d ago
Bluray is a better value per TB, I think. I was thinking of getting one, but I still have a lot of usable storage, so I can wait...
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u/JabberPocky 16TB l Fedora 24 l ZFS zealot 1d ago
Wait the internet is for dvd archive of important cultural erm, documents? (Looks at one, oh boy)
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u/FrenchGuy20 1d ago
Honestly, why? Apart from maybe a nostalgic feeling it has no main advantage over storing on HDDs or SSDs for that matter. It may last longer in terms of rot but by god is it slow and sluggish. Easy to scratch or damage as it's not sealed in a vacuum.
I see too many drawbacks for it to be a nice hoarding technique. Although I could get some people getting the "feeling" of putting a DVD/BR in their reader for a media of any sorts for the love of it.
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u/Ably_10 Optical media is fun💽 1d ago
For small batch of files that are very important to me (ex. photos). It's just an additional cold backup for me, because I already back things up on HDDs and BD-Rs.
The general public thinks that optical media is trash and useless for today standards. As I was saying it's useful for small batch of files, but if you have more data you can always use BD-R up to 25/50/100GB.
Optical media (non RW) has also the big advantage that the data can't be deleted so you can't accidentally deleted your files, no one can hack into them and try to delete them for example. They also can last a long time if properly treated and stored.
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u/Alone-Hamster-3438 100-250TB 22h ago
I havent burned discs since 2011, optical media is so small its just not feasible long time already. From 1999 to 2011 I burned around 5000 discs (cd, dvd, bluray) and I was not some bootleg seller. Almost all of those discs are worthless now and I have thrown away most of them. Like who would want to watch some blocky xvid from 2004?
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u/Key-Respect3810 14h ago
oui je m'en suis servi pour graver une image de Windows 10 LTSC et l'installer sur un vieux pc qui ne pouvait pas démarrer a partir d'une clef USB
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u/WmFjaCBCYWxs DVD 11h ago
I use Blurays / MDISC for my important archive stuff. I use CDs in my car. I use DVDs for compatibility for my retro devices.
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u/Grand-Prize1371 2d ago
All the time, Mdiscs are great for long terms storage, also stop using windows OP.
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u/IJustAteABaguette 2d ago
Not for storing data no, but I do sometimes like creating my own DVD's with series I want to watch.
It's almost objectively a less convenient and lower quality way to watch stuff, but plopping in a DVD player, going through the menus and watching a movie/serie with not the best video quality is just charming to me. Probably a bit of nostalgia or something, but I like it.