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Comment by hmry | Hacker News Reader

Optical disc media is pretty great, if only they didn't scratch so easily... Or get completely destroyed if something sticks to the label side and you try to pull it off... Or delaminate themselves from old age...

Enclosed discs like Minidisc solve most of those, but still die from age.

Still hope they can perfect those "laser-created point clouds in glass cubes" media someday

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Minidiscs are the most practical physical media I’ve come across. The used discs I’ve bought are 20-25 years old and don’t have a case or anything and still play like they were recorded yesterday, even when their contents make it clear that they were recorded to shortly after the disc was manufactured. The CDs and DVDs I’ve burned of the same age are comparably in much poorer shape, some being entirely unreadable.

Their size is great, too, being about as small as you can get while still being easy to handle across the gamut of human hand sizes yet too big to easily lose, and they’re more fun than SD and CF cards with their outer plastic casings coming in all sorts of colors and patterns.

A new media format that takes these strengths and fuses them with those of flash storage would be wonderful. The only thing is that I don’t know how you’d solve is the bit rot problem flash has when spending extended time powered down — maybe dedicated storage for parity data? Capacitors that hold just enough juice to keep the flash “alive”? Redundant flash chips? This isn’t my area of expertise so I’m just throwing things at the wall haha.

I recently started an effort to make backups of all of my DVDs and blurays, and it's not a lot but I do have a number of older discs of both sorts that now have errors or even can't be read at all despite only leaving their cases a handful of times and having no visual damage.

It's been sobering for me.

What software are you using for this?

Not the parent, but I've been using Handbrake for DVDs and good old CD Paranoia for CDs.

I'm not them, but I've had good success with ~20 year old CD-Rs using GNU ddrescue.

https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

Not everything was recoverable, but the vast vast majority was.

MakeMKV

What brand/model of discs had high failure rates?

I've yet to lose any data after validating a good burn on any M-DISC DVD even well over a decade now. I have also not experienced any loss in data for Verbatim Blu-rays after validating the burn.

I remember back when I was making xbox 360 back ups buying a cheap dvd just would not work most of the time getting to many errors. I think it was the Verbatim brand also burned at a slow speed that seemed to be the most successful. My thought with that is that being cheap to save a few bucks on on discs might cost you your data. Buy the trusted brands who have a proven track record.

Yeah, I remember finding a good supply of Verbatim DVD+/-Rs and +RWs, and iirc the -Rs seemed to work better for my particular stock internal optical drive, and a slow burn speed was key. Once I got FTP setup to my desktop and sorted out the FATX situation, I upgraded my internal HDD and didn't really mess with disc-based backups for 360 as it didn't seem worth the hassle once I got it ironed out, which I'll admit was a decently complex project involving hot-swapping, but not much more complicated than the initial drive firmware flash. They're fun machines to mod, especially as I had just finished an OG Xbox softmod project at the time (~2007).

Edit:

This might be relevant to your interests, and to others interested in 360 modding.

https://github.com/grimdoomer/Xbox360BadUpdate

> Bad Update is a non-persistent software only hypervisor exploit for Xbox 360 that works on the latest (17559) software version. This repository contains the exploit files that can be used on an Xbox 360 console to run unsigned code.

Addendum:

Modern Vintage Gamer's video of the exploit, which is amazing to see. I had no idea 360 softmods were a thing, and the exploit can run against a free trial version of a retail game, which is just chef's kiss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycY09EUm8wA

> Any Xbox 360 can now be hacked in less than one minute

> A look a the newest V1.2 Badupdate Exploit - Xbox 360 software only Hypervisor Hack that we covered back in March 2025. It requires an Xbox 360 - any model including the later Winchester revisions! A USB flash drive and Rock Band Blitz Trial. This updated 1.2 hack runs much faster and reliable and is now a recommended option to hack any Xbox 360. In today's episode we take a closer look at the BadUpdate V1.2 exploit.

Oh I didn't see your comment right away. Yes I did hear about the mod you mention but what I actually did years ago was the Reset Glitch Hack (RGH) on mine and several other 360's. It required soldering in a tiny piece of hardware which required you to solder to the smallest of pads on the motherboard. I remember at the time I had the cheapest junk soldering iron and nothing to help magnify the board and the pad you need to connect a wire to is literally smaller then a pen tip. Many people screwed up and lifted pads causing big problems for their 360. I had some previous experience soldering and managed to have no problems with the install.

In the end my RGH worked really well and it would boot first try every time, some people it could take like a minute to actually boot. Then it would load into custom firmware and I was able to do what ever I wanted. I still have the thing and it still runs with an external HDD with about 1000 games (all personal back ups of course) and my kids never knew how lucky they were to be allowed to play all my games I had backed up.

It’s okay, most of what I wrote was with my OG Xbox in mind and I got my wires crossed talking about the 360, which I think I only did an optical drive firmware flash on. I never tried the RGH, that sounds kinda fun though I’d start with the soft mod I mentioned first or instead if I were to try again today.

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