Ask HN: Do you still use DVD?

I love DVD-R for installing Linux distros, especially if I want to get familiar with a lot of different OS, break them often, install again and all of this on real machines. USB does not love much re-writes. Prone to scratches in those DVDs is compensated with the fact that distributives tend to obsolete in few years. Last time I used DVD for that I wanted CD, but the seller made a big eyes and gladly appreciated the fact that someone wants to buy that very-old-nobody-needs DVD-R or DVD-RW things (no CD in stock). The price is $0.25 per each. That nobody knows how old DVD-RWs required more than 1 try to write, DVD-R keeps working perfectly.

Perfectly means that old discs written by user DVD-ROM typically does not work unless super-careful storage and frankly saying do not expected to work, and there are no much laptops with DVD-ROM around nowadays. But some fabric discs with movies are expected to work and they mostly work nice. If I want to re-watch a movie which is in my DVD collection I prefer to take it from here unless I really want better picture then mpeg2 can deliver.

I still put DVD and/or Blu-ray drives in all PCs I personally build for myself and my family. This is due to the fact that we transferred dozens of old captured 16 mm and 8 mm film reels, scanned photo prints, negatives and slides as well as Video8, Hi8, Digital8 and VHS videocassettes to M-DISC DVD and some to Blu-ray. While I uploaded most of this content to Flickr and Google Photos while they were offering 1TB and unlimited storage (at reduced quality) respectfully, after both services curtailed their offerings, I realize the value in having a local, offline, physical copy of these precious memories. Thankfully my local computer store Micro Center still sells a few PC cases with 5.25 inch bays as well as optical media and disk drives.

Additionally, I find it useful for live booting GNU/Linux distributions such as MX Linux Workbench [0] or WinPE environments such as Hiren's Boot CD [1] without dedicating a flash drive for the purpose, which I may accidentally overwrite. And at the office, I have encountered several broken USB ports and while optical disk drive bays are often quite fragile, they tend to be in working order since they are often underutilized.

[0] https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-21-1-respin-workbench-released/

[1] http://hirensbootcd.org/

I do, yes, but I use archival grade DVDs for it, like these: https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/dvd/archival-g...

Used to use DVDs, switched to Blu-Ray, mostly I’d back up to a USB drive or the cloud today.

I still burn a lot of CDs but these are music, not the usual PCM encoding, but with a DTS 5.1 soundtrack. I put them in my Sony 300 disc changer that is hooked up to my home theatre through an optical cable and often they sound great. The CD blanks are getting harder to find, I can get them at Staples but Best Buy doesn’t have them and Amazon takes too long to ship.

I still watch plenty of DVDs.

I exclusively use external hard drives. If I need to transfer data, I'll use a cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox. However, I would like to start a Blu-Ray collection because I like the visual aspect seeing the collection, and also owning the media. But for backups, no.

I still have an external DVD-drive for my DVD-Movies. Do you think that datas are not secure on an external disk or usb-stick?

Well I still have CD and DVD backups from ~2004. Most are intact, some CDs of less quality (I don't think any verbatim) have delaminated and would throw the aluminum around if inserted.

I don't use CD, DVD or BR as a backup medium. I might cut a USB flash drive to copy photos or tax/important docs etc.

Once upon a time a large part of my role was to maintain backups and disaster recovery - I'm pretty bad at it for myself. I have some important things in cloud, on phone, on computer. Super rare, if ever, will I cut copies onto cold storage.

My main backup method is - this drive is too small, copy everything on it to a larger disk and park it on the shelf.

I've lost a fair amount of data faithfully following this process. Mostly didn't matter as a lot of it is games. Possibly dashcam which sucks because of the efforts to store it but meh, it was near 100% mundane driving to and from work.

I believe it was a 2TB spinning rust controller failure - nuts. Just dead is dead - the data's probably physically is still there but I don't have a matched controller board to even begin to try. I probably wouldn't even if I did.

I've had an SSD just pack it in while using it. The one time I go to boot windows again in literal years it decides it'd be better off dead. If plugged in will get super hot to touch - to it's credit that drive was about 14 years service. Truly impressive.