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When is the last time you burnt a CD or DVD for personal use.

DesiPower

DesiPower

Lifer
Back in the days when hard drive space was relatively expensive and I my financial situation was more humble, I would back up my stuff on CDs, then came the DVDs and I used them for backup. I would also burn music for the car. Then came the MP3 players and cars with AUX or USB ports. Burning music CDs was over, Spindles of CDs started collecting dust. DVD was still in use, HDD cost still would not make sense to store all my collection of movies and games. Then games started becoming available online downloads and HDD prices were in free fall, currently I am sitting on 4 4TB hdds and disk space will never be an issue again, network bandwidth also played a role and so now spindles of DVDs are collecting dust. Even BRDs don't make sense, but I did burn a couple for the experience.
They only reason now I use DVDs is to burn OS, Microsoft OS, Linux can be done on UBS drives. Once MS makes OS installation through USB more easy I dont think I will burn a DVD ever again.

What about you, when did you burn your last DVD/CD? how often do you do it and why?
 
I bought a 100 pack spindle of each about 3 months ago when our Office Max went under. At the time I resigned to the possibility that these would be the last writable optical media I bought.

I think the last one I burned was over a year ago.
 
the last few times i burned a DVD/CD was to distribute photos i took in some event (wedding, track days) to some friends who may want it in high resolution for prints. If print is not needed and the amount of pictures are low, i just post them on flickr, fb, or google photo album. USB drive wasn't cheap enough to just give away, plus i still had a stack of CD/DVD collecting dust just like you.
 
Maybe around ten years ago? I used to occasionally make mp3 cds for the car, and bootable O/S/rescue discs, but I've done everything with usb for a long time.
 
Last year to make a Windows 8.1 recovery CD after upgrading a PC from 8.0.

Between Amazon S3 and USB flash and platter drives I no longer use CDs/DVDs for backup.
 
burning one now, to give some public domain movies to my sister.

I loaned my last good thumb drive to my boyfriend, to give to his aunt with a bunch of movies on it to watch when she was recovering from surgery, and never saw it again. 🙁
 
For personal use? Years. Shit, probably almost a decade.

Still have to burn a disc every now and then for work, unfortunately.
 
Think I missed the boat on that. Not sure if I ever did successfully or not. By the time I got around to buying discs, thumb drives were popping up and rendering them obsolete. I never made music cds. Backups I write to another hard drive.

At work though, I used to backup to cd-rom. Then dvd-rom. Now thumb drive.
 
About a month ago I ordered an mp3 album from amazon for my grandparents and burned it to disk. That was the first one in at least 5 years though.
 
It's hard to imagine many uses (outside of OS ISOs) that a flash drive isn't vastly more suited for. Faster, more compact, larger. And now that many OSes can be installed from a flash drive, writable optical media is largely dead.
 
lxskllr said:
Maybe around ten years ago? I used to occasionally make mp3 cds for the car, and bootable O/S/rescue discs, but I've done everything with usb for a long time.
Click to expand...

These are my two current use cases.

Unfortunately my wife's car doesn't have USB input and I really prefer not to use the aux input, so MP3 discs it is.

Also, I have several old PCs that won't boot off USB.
 
Today, as a matter of fact.

DistroWatch showed that Debian 8.1.0 was out.

So that's 3 DVDs for the AMD64, 3 DVDs for the i386, and then 7 DVDs for each one of the AMD64 Live variants, and then 7 more DVDs for the i386 Live variants.

I play PokeISO with Linux/BSD variants. Gotta burn em all!
 
I used to burn an ISO of any OS I install so I have it on hand for future reinstalls, and I'd usually make a couple copies of various Windows OSes to have on hand too.

But since I bought a portable hard drive that has an ISO emulation function I never need to burn another ISO again. Basically you store ISOs on the hard drive and then there's a little menu on it (physically) to select which ISO to "mount" then it shows up as a cdrom drive and you can boot off it. Best thing ever. I used to have various rescue CDs as not all computers support USB boot, but it's been a while since I've done any of that stuff and when I do it tends to be newer computers now.

I'm toying with the idea of using Bluray for archiving data though, but they're kinda pricy. I've never had good luck with burning optical media, always get several coasters before one finally works, so I have to take that into account in the price. I'm even thinking SD cards could also make good archive media, though I'm not sure what the reliability is like. I guess if you set them to read only after it should be fine I'd imagine? I think the reliability issues people sometimes have are from pulling them out too early. (that's what she said)
 
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VirtualLarry said:
Today, as a matter of fact.

DistroWatch showed that Debian 8.1.0 was out.

So that's 3 DVDs for the AMD64, 3 DVDs for the i386, and then 7 DVDs for each one of the AMD64 Live variants, and then 7 more DVDs for the i386 Live variants.

I play PokeISO with Linux/BSD variants. Gotta burn em all!
Click to expand...

Is that for work or personal? why dont you do them on flash drives? do you have to give them away?
 
DesiPower said:
Is that for work or personal? why dont you do them on flash drives? do you have to give them away?
Click to expand...

1) Personal
2) Flash drives are still way too expensive, to waste one flash drive per ISO. (And I get them fairly cheap, under $5 ea.)
3) No, I don't have to, but I do, sometimes.
 
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