lemonofthesoul

mfw i kin the guy from ironina

  • they/them he/him



“TAKE DOWN THE DEMON BRIOCHE!!!”


“BEAT THOSE BAD GUYS DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!”





jetsetruri
@jetsetruri

I have some discs a family member burnt in 2010. One contained our pirated Wii games, our Wii NAND backups, his Firefox bookmarks, music, and even my old Super Mario Bros. X levels. I've backed these up with ddrescue, and compressed them with gzip.

Now, I love keeping a record of my memories (in the form of photos, videos, screenshots, or gameplay recordings) to revisit them. But guess where these records lasted the longest? The discs, my physical notebooks, old emails (where I often overshared), and my cloud storage. (Relating to physical notebooks, you should read this blog post.)

On the contrary, my internal and external hard drives, USB flash storage, and SD cards are where my data goes to die. My data has a very short lifespan because:

  • I lose some things while moving from place-to-place
  • I forget to backup everything because it's so confusingly organized
  • in the case of hard drives, it catastrophically fails

So here's my idea.

I counted 52 blank DVDs (maybe 54, but they're a different brand...), but there might be more than that. I'm thinking of the idea of making several "themed backups" which include different things on them, like my Minecraft worlds, recordings during a certain year, music or ROMs, etc, heavily compressed (whether it be losslessly or not) to make as much fit as possible. This might not be limited to my discs either; it's just a fun way to organize things.

EDIT (2023-09-05): Reworked the post.


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in reply to @jetsetruri's post:

something like this has been floating around in my head for a while now (more so after switching OS and reorganising everything.)
I hope this isn’t a stupid question but would DVD-RW be a better option than DVD-R, for example, a yearly archive? I assume RW makes it easier to access the data in the future (??)

Hey no worries, that's not a stupid question

I would've thought that it doesn't matter too much whether or not you're using DVD-R or DVD-RW for long-term archival. I searched it up just to be sure, but the claimed lifespans for DVD-R discs outlast the claimed lifespans for DVD-RW discs

So DVD-R sounds like a good bet, but keep in mind that the newer computers I've seen don't have disc drives, so if you plan on keeping your discs for years (I only considered this idea because they outlived my hardware, HDDs, etc), you'll probably need to keep an older computer lying around, or get a USB disc drive

Best of luck!!

Thanks for the reply!
That’s good to know that there’s not really a noticeable difference between them. DVD-R will be great! (for me at least, even 10 years should be ok for now)
My laptop doesn't have a disk drive. There might be an old PC somewhere but a usb disc drive would be useful to have for portability so i’ll look around for one.

It’s probably going to be an organisational / archival thing for artwork and photos I haven't touched in years. Hopefully it will also work out be more cost effective than using a cloud storage provider.

Thank you, i’ll need the luck! :]