Is optical media a viable option for backup? CD/DVD/Blu-Ray

>>60361696
Hard drives are better in every way

That depends on how many gigs of data you're trying to save. Optical is very slow.

>>60361696
yes, but no.

i recently went through all sorts of old stuff backed up onto cds, and backed it up onto a flash drive. yes, i got stuff that was from as far back as when i was in high school back in 02 and got over 15 years of stuff. but i had to go through almost 200 disks and some were so scratched up and shit to the point i could barely pull anything off it.

>>60361696
If you're backing up something that fits on them, yes.

>>60361888
The nice thing about optical discs is that they're cheap enough that you can burn one and ask your friend to keep it, or something. They're the easiest way to do off-site, off-line backups. When you want to update the backup you just burn another disc. You can do this with hard drives but its cumbersome and more expensive.

Use dvdisaster so that you have a better chance of pulling data off the disc even if it degrades.

>>60361888
But that's wrong. Optical disks are cheaper per physical copy, so it's easier to have a bunch of copies in separate places for redundancy. They have no moving parts of their own to fail. If the optical drive fails, extracting the disk and using it in a different drive is trivial. If a hard drive motor or whatever fails, it's a lot more of a hassle to deal with. Optical media isn't effected by magnets, and isn't damaged by water within a sensible period of time.

Hard drives are better in *many* ways, but certainly not every way.

>>60361696
It's too slow. And not really cheaper than HDD anyway.

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>>60361696
Sure.