The Exaggerated Death of Optical

Every month, I take the live version of every site on our network (plus VDU and sushi’s sites, since they’re on our hosting), download them, and make backups. I have site backups going back to July 2019, meaning by next month, I will have a year of full Somnolescent history in my possession. For context, mon didn’t even have a site yet, and borb’s was basically one page.

Some of Somnolescent's backup DVD-Rs

As for the media? Optical discs. Originally, I had a spindle of single-layer DVD-Rs from years ago that I just wanted to use up, but now, I’m using dual-layer HP DVD+Rs. These are just about the perfect fit for us and aside from getting a few duds higher up in the spindle, they’ve worked great. These backups have already saved our asses many times in the past. (What I really need now is another CD binder…)

Yet, the prevailing idea is that optical media, CDs, DVDs, all them are on their way out. People aren’t buying them! Just use the cloud, you damn luddites! It’s 2020, what the fuck do you need a disc drive in your computer for? Even the people who I’d probably just the most to keep data handy, Archive Team, explicitly recommend against optical discs for storage, citing their lack of longevity and per-gigabyte price. (They also say pressed CDs have a shelf life of seven years. Jason, I want what you’re on.)

One thing I’ve ranted about before is the artificial phasing out of a wide variety of perfectly functional, valuable media types, but it was simply under the guise of music. In terms of data storage, I bemoan it even harder. You see, a major label album probably won’t get lost any time soon, no matter the format, but your personal data? It becomes especially important to not just have multiple copies, but also to get it on as many formats as possible. Reason being? Different formats fail for different reasons and at different rates.

Say you have an external hard drive. The most relevant data on the longevity of hard drives comes from Backblaze. After three years, roughly, you start to have a good chance of having your drive wear out. Unlike Jason’s ridiculous “three years for a burned disc” lifespan, this one, I’ve actually experienced firsthand. So you buy two hard drives. You’re probably storing them both in the same conditions, conditions that will directly affect that drive’s ability to get the data that’s on it. Even if you’re not, as people who use RAID are aware, drives of similar ages fail at similar ages.

Okay, so say that does happen, say the drive fails. Problem is, the drive is also the way you get the data off it. Think of everything that can fail on a hard drive–the motor, the platters, the head and arm, fuck, the USB connector. Moving parts and multiple failure points, plus an utter inability to recover a toast drive without the help of an expensive outside agency is why you can’t trust this one single medium.

As for my anecdotes, I’ve already had two externals fail in the past five years, plus a glitch that took down an internal hard drive in the past year. I’ve not had the best luck with them. Perhaps that’s because of how I used them, admittedly, but I’m not careless with my stuff. My most grievous sin is having them plugged in a lot, something I’m not repeating with these new drives. As for burned discs? The oldest ones in my collection still read and play fine. Some of the only surviving footage of me from my middle school days, seeing as I nuked my YouTube channel multiple times in the past, comes from a friend’s burned DVD-R of a school production. In all of my discs, the only one to ever fail on me was a professionally pressed disc of The Black Keys’ Magic Potion. Several years worth of DVD-Rs still read fine.

My point here isn’t that hard drives can’t be trusted–those site backups go on two different external hard drives, after all. My point is that there’s no harm and perhaps plenty of good to come out of diversifying your backup media, or at the very least, not looking at recordables like they’re ticking time bombs. The goal of backing up data is to plan for failure, not to replace one medium with another and hope it fails less.

Optical discs, even if you trust that “they last a few years” metric (which is true, just not to that extent), are far more likely to have something recoverable off them. In fact, I once cracked a CD that came inside a paperback book with a drumstick, and I was still able to get most of the PDFs off it. Direct physical damage to a disc that would’ve certainly totalled a hard drive didn’t even render it totally unreadable. I see no reason why they can’t be relied on at least as far as an external goes.

Okay, but what about price? Hard drives are just cheaper per-gigabyte, aren’t they? Yes. If we’re talking pure price efficiency, external hard drives can’t be beat. For about the same price as two of the spindles of the double-layer HP DVD-Rs I bought (so that’s 860gb between both spindles), you can have a 2tb, USB 3.0 Seagate drive. Here’s the thing: have you ever filled up a 1tb drive, let alone a 2tb drive? I haven’t, and no one I know ever has. In real-world, general use, our entire site network fits in 6gb. Trying to throw all the data I possibly could at the filebase only got me to about 130gb. Maybe people who torrent entire console libraries for emulation can fill up a drive, but I don’t do that. The idea that a terabyte is some kind of baseline that obsoletes everything smaller than it is utterly ridiculous.

I think the real reason people think optical discs are obsolete is because we’re lazy. To burn a disc of site backups requires me to retrieve a blank, stuff it in a drive, copy the data to that drive in Windows Explorer, and wait for the thing to burn. In this age of “it’s all in the cloud” (and thus being datamined and likely that someone else will destroy your data instead) and literally lightning-fast Thunderbolt connectors, the concept of burning a disc at 6x is just too passe for those crazy, top-of-the-line power users.

And to that I say, you’re insane. I’m gonna use hard drives. I’m also gonna use discs and flash drives. I’m also gonna print stuff out. If it’s for public consumption, might as well back it up in the cloud too. I’d use tape backup if I had tapes. Nothing is obsolete as far as storage goes, not the physical realm, not the digital realm. If you’re keeping stuff safe, any copy is a good copy.

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