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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

After many years without an optical drive in my home, I bought an external one within the last year or so. It's one of those things that occasionally comes up, and is useful to have around, and I figured the longer I waited the more difficult it would become to find a decent one.

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Optical media is unmatched for archival purposes. I have photos, videos, and documents I'd be devastated to lose. I simply cannot trust magnetic or solid-state storage over the long term.

Luckily blurays are still somewhat cheap in Japan so I stock up when I visit. Stored properly they should outlive me.

If you care about your data, you need to have a regular process where you check the copies and remake them from time to time.

Hopefully some of the copies live on after your death. Optical does well, but I've seen reasonably treated cd-rs degrade, and well treated pressed cds decay. Sometimes some mistake in production takes years to become apparent, but results in a fixed lifetime below the estimates.

I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I stopped using them for backups.

Blu rays are meant to be like the old M-Discs and they should last ages. I've been burning my archives to BDXL discs for years and never had any issues reading them back.

Thanks for the suggestion, I actually might invest in a new BDXL-capable burner.

Regular optical media can suffer corrosion of the aluminium reflector layer, and breakdown of the dye. Sure, they do make archival grade discs (e.g. with a gold layer) but they're expensive.

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