It might shock you to learn that I have burned over 100 optical discs in the past year, but that’s just a fraction of how many discs I burned at the peak of physical media storage.
From compilation CDs for my car to home movies, photos, and everything in between. Before the cloud and cheap terabytes of local storage my entire digital life existed in flip folders full of hundreds of shiny discs. Today, I doubt most people even know how to burn a disc, but it might be a good time to
When burning a disc meant something
When I got my first CD burner, I think my hard drive was something like 4-5GB in size. Given that each CD-R was 700MB and with “overburning” you could push that past 800MB apparently, but I never actually tried that myself. Maybe I should!
Either way, when a mere 10-pack of CD-Rs offers more storage than your entire hard drive, you can imagine how central these discs were to my computing life. Rewritable CDs in particular rocked my world. I only owned one USB flash drive, which cost me a month’s allowance and only stored 64MB. So having three or four CD-RWs that could be used over and over again was a game changer.
When I upgraded to a DVD burner a few years later and now the discs were a whopping 4.7GB in size, I thought I’d never run out of cheap storage again. Burnable CDs and DVDs were how I got information about the world too. We wouldn’t get internet connectivity until years after I started burning discs, so my only access to content from the internet was what other people would download and share on CDs.
There’s always a robust discussion around how durable optical discs are, and when it comes to factory-pressed discs that have a metal data layer sandwiched between plastic layers, well, if you take care of them they’ll probably outlast you.
Burned discs are a different story, since they use a photo-sensitive dye to store data. Typically, I’ve seen lifespan numbers quoted around the 10-year mark, but it really does depend on the brand and specific chemistry of that disc. When it comes to “archival” discs, lifespan claims from manufacturers are usually in decades, centuries, or even more. Conveniently, those companies won’t be around to honor that promise!
Personally, most of the discs I burned in the early 2000s were still perfectly fine in 2015, which is when I transferred all the important stuff to external hard drives and disposed of my discs. Since then, my most important data has moved into the cloud, but as I’ve learned over the years, it’s always good to have multiple backup media and locations. So now optical discs have returned as part of my data storage strategy. It was pretty cheap too!
I bought a USB DVD burner for $25 and a quality 50-pack of DVD-R discs is about ten bucks. That’s still way more expensive per-gigabyte than a large modern hard drive, but not exactly expensive for moderately sized data backups like important documents, photos, videos, and anything else you want to store long-term. Remember, we want something in addition to hard drives and cloud storage.
What modern disc burning actually looks like
At the peak of my disc-burning enthusiasm, I had a tower with four drives in it, which I used to create thousands of copies of my old band’s demo disc. Not just any drives, but “LightScribe” drives which also had a photo-sensitive label, which allowed you to use the drive’s laser to burn a monochrome design on the top of the disc.
These days, your typical desktop tower doesn’t have anywhere to put optical drives, and laptops (with some exceptions) don’t come with optical drives either.
So your only real option is an external drive, but the options are many. In fact, you may even want to opt for an external Blu-ray burner. While the drives are a bit more expensive, the discs have significantly more storage capacity, and theoretically should be more durable than CDs or DVDs.
Disc burning software (I use ImgBurn) is still up-to-date and free. So why not keep an optical storage option around?
Why the “obsolete” format might outlive the cloud
While it may feel like cloud storage has been around forever, the truth is that we’re still in the early phases of storing our data on someone else’s computer hundreds of miles away. Even of the technology works well, there are many other factors that could send your data from the cloud here on Earth to the great cloud in the sky—where no DNS can resolve it.
So why not rediscover the joy of lasering your data onto a shiny disc? It’s just as cool as it sounds.