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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I mean, honestly, I don't think either my dad nor I did any research on the quality of the DVDs we were buying. I think, for whatever reason, we just assumed that there wasn't a fundamental difference between the cheap and expensive stuff. Obviously we should have researched it more if we were using it for preservation.

I keep a USB blu-ray drive around because I like to have rips of my physical media, and it seems to read CDs just fine. None of my computers have a CD drive built in anymore.

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At the time I (and my dad) were buying CD-R and DVD-R for storing/backing up home media, we still had dial-up internet. "Research" was precious time on the phone line and while I am one to indulge in an excursion down the presumably gratuitous information rabbit hole on many topics, the archival-ness of burned discs never occurred to me. It must have been a discussion on it here on HN, many years after the last time I used disc drive for burning, that I realized it was something worth thinking about.

That's a valid reason; sadly I don't have it. My family was the first that I knew of (personally) to get cable internet, we had it in some capacity since 1999, so our internet was fast and unlimited. We should have done a Google search.

Still, I don't feel like we came to the conclusion of CDs being archive-grade on our own, someone probably told us that a "CD will last forever" and we just never questioned it.

Coming from floppy disks which were always a fridge (or file cabinet) magnet away from total destruction it made sense. I didn't know that anything after vinyl LPs were pressed so burned with a laser just sounded much more permanent than bit-flipped-by-magnet. Meaning, faster internet wouldn't have made me any more likely to question this stuff but made it easier if by chance I came across some advice to do so. Anyway it's 2024 and my dad still has floppies (working) and cable internet, but the world still turns 'round I guess.

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