alt Hacker NewsI still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all...
Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
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You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere.
More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.
New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.
The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.
> The drives are huge
You can get 5.25" bay drives.
> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.
> Please do not say LTO tapes.
Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.
I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years.
Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now.
So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.