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 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 revisit the experience of burning optical media.
### 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 held 700MB—and with “overburning,” you could push that past 800MB (though I never actually tried it myself)—you can imagine how central these discs were to my computing life.
A mere 10-pack of CD-Rs offered more storage than my entire hard drive!
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, the discs suddenly had a whopping 4.7GB of space. I thought I’d never run out of cheap storage again.
Burnable CDs and DVDs were also how I got information about the world. We didn’t have internet connectivity until years after I started burning discs, so my only access to content from the internet was what other people downloaded and shared on CDs.
### Optical Media Never Stopped Being Reliable
There’s always a robust discussion about how durable optical discs are. Factory-pressed discs, which have a metal data layer sandwiched between plastic layers, are incredibly durable. 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 estimates quoted around the 10-year mark, but it really depends on the brand and chemistry of the disc.
When it comes to “archival” discs, manufacturers often claim lifespans of decades, centuries, or even longer. Conveniently, those companies may not be around to honor such promises!
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.
### Optical Discs Are Surprisingly Affordable
It was pretty cheap to get back into optical media. I bought a USB DVD burner for $25 and a quality 50-pack of DVD-R discs for 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’re talking about a storage option in addition to hard drives and cloud storage—not a replacement.
### 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 with a photo-sensitive label that allowed the drive’s laser to burn a monochrome design on top of the disc.
These days, most desktop towers don’t have space for optical drives, and laptops (with some exceptions) don’t come with them either. So your only real option is an external drive—and the options are many.
In fact, you might even want to consider an external Blu-ray burner. While the drives are a bit more expensive, Blu-ray discs offer significantly more storage capacity and theoretically should be more durable than CDs or DVDs.
Disc burning software—like the free and up-to-date ImgBurn that I use—is still widely available. So why not keep an optical storage option around?
### Why This “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 trusting someone else’s computers, hundreds of miles away, to keep our data safe.
Even if the technology works well, many other factors 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.
https://www.howtogeek.com/the-forgotten-art-of-burning-discs-and-why-it-still-matters/
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