9 ms·

The DVD is dead. USB flash drive restores are here.

76 points by budmang 15y ago

HPBEggo 15y ago
So true. The DVD has run its course. With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.
AndrewWarner 15y ago
Finally! I had about 100 gigs to restore from another backup company. They sent me a stack of DVDs. Now I have to feed them all to my computer, one at a time.
MicahWedemeyer 15y ago
While I think this is a good move for backup restoration, I think it's a little hasty to call DVDs dead. Redbox doesn't seem to mind raking in the cash on a "dead" media format.
- chillyconker 15y ago
  Can we at least call them annoying? I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on, we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-) I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal. Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to copy my files in less than 103 minutes. And they scratch quite easily too! I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage ought to do the trick.
yuvipanda 15y ago
None of my computers have had a working DVD Drive for the las t 4-5 years and I'm yet to go 'damn I need a DVD Drive!"'
drivebyacct2 15y ago
Nice of them to tell us what some of us have known for sometime... I haven't used a DVD in... at least 4 years except for installing Office because it was $10 on optical media from my University. This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch + fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  It's a feature announcement on a product blog. It's supposed to feel like an ad.
- chousuke 15y ago
  I hadn't used DVDs in years either, but when I did need my DVD drive yesterday (I wanted to try out Arch Linux) I found out it's malfunctioning :/ I can burn the disc with it, but for some reason it refuses to read anything. To top it off, for some reason inserting my USB stick crashes the bootloader. rEFIt works perfectly fine until I put in the drive, then everything freezes.
yellowbkpk 15y ago
That was the longest way of saying "We now offer mailed USB flash drives as a restore option for up to 28GB of data." I've ever seen.
- batista 15y ago
  Yeah, saying that and also, you know, providing very insightful statistics related to DVD use and some historical data on the matter. The part of the article you somehow missed.
eli 15y ago
DVDs are ridiculously cheap to produce en masse. USB drives are getting cheaper, but it's not really the same ball park.
felipemnoa 15y ago
It will be great once USB Flash Drives become as cheap as DVDs. For one thing the memory of the flash drive will continue to increase while maintaining the same form factor. And for another they don' damage as easily as a DVD.
dangrossman 15y ago
Tangentially related: I really wish you could buy a pack of cheap flash drives the way you buy a pack of DVDs. At any given time, all the technology/office stores around carry a range of flash drives from $9.99 to $99.99. The capacity you get for a dollar goes up over time, but they never offer a drive for less than $10 (except the occasional advertised sale) or a package of multiple small drives for less than $10.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- cabirum 15y ago
  relevant: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/ http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/ Can't believe something like this does not exist yet.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  Well, I have seen packs of SD/MicroSD cards, and built-in readers are fairly common...
oconnore 15y ago
Read-write media will never be as cheap as write-once-read-many media. Perhaps DVD's are on the way out, but their replacement will not come in the form of traditional USB flash drives. For example, Blu-ray discs are about $0.03 per GB, where a USB flash drive is approximately $1.00 per GB. Using flash memory for WORM style storage (like backups) is just silly.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  The cost differential only really makes a difference if you are backing up a lot of data - and if that's the case, you are likely backing up to a Drobo or something like that, and mirroring to BackBlaze for your offsite. Not saying _nobody_ backs up to Blu-Ray, but I'm guessing they are in the 1% of the population these days. What I'd really like, is for someone to come up with a practical form of Archival Media. Something that you could put on your shelf, and _know_ it would still be readable, 10,20,30,40 years from now. I often wonder whether these guys are for real: http://millenniata.com/ http://millenniata.com/
- cabirum 15y ago
  Silly? One USB drive can hold several backups, each new backup rewrites the oldest one. On the other hand, you need 30 DVDs/month (assuming daily backups, and a backup takes ~1 dvd), time to write them, and a space to store them. Also, it is way less reliable.
  - oconnore 15y ago
    That scheme would be far less reliable. For one, if you corrupt a file and don't notice right away, you lose it forever (which sort of defeats the purpose of backups, doesn't it?). Also, you wouldn't actually do a full backup every day. You would perform data journaling with periodic snapshots. For example, with daily backups with a change rate of 5%, and monthly snapshots, you need only 2.5x your data size per month ignoring the minimal transaction overhead.
- Terretta 15y ago
  Er, tape is read write, and cheaper than your write once examples: 1600GB for $24.
noonespecial 15y ago
I keep a dvd drive on a shelf for "historical" purposes. Every once in a while I have to read one. Dvd jumped the shark right about the time I could download 4 gig in about the same time it took to read it off a crummy dvd-r.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Watch how fast people start hitting Comcast's 250GB data cap in 2012 and on... especially after people start trusting online backup providers, Amazon Cloud Drive, etc with their files. That 250GB cap includes download and upload -- two months over the limit and you are terminated for 1 year, even if Comcast is the only ISP servicing your region. Watch one HD Netflix movie a night and you've used 105GB. Make a daily backup of a 5GB folder to a cloud service and you've now gone over your monthly cap. Goodbye internet. That's what keeps me from using online backup services. If everyone is going to start downloading 4GB DVDs instead of buying software in stores, too, something's gonna have to give.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    If you have a gigabit connection, you can use 250 GBytes in about 45 minutes. The solution is to make the networks faster, not avoid using them.
    - sbinetd 15y ago
      The solution is to be the only ISP in the area, and to strong-arm start-up competitors out of business with year-long contracts that force you to pay for months you have remaining upon cancellation. Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast) (Don't tell anyone)
epaga 15y ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum (1996)

76 points by budmang 15y ago

So true. The DVD has run its course. With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.

AndrewWarner 15y ago

Finally! I had about 100 gigs to restore from another backup company. They sent me a stack of DVDs. Now I have to feed them all to my computer, one at a time.

MicahWedemeyer 15y ago

While I think this is a good move for backup restoration, I think it's a little hasty to call DVDs dead. Redbox doesn't seem to mind raking in the cash on a "dead" media format.

chillyconker 15y ago
Can we at least call them annoying? I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on, we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-) I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal. Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to copy my files in less than 103 minutes. And they scratch quite easily too! I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage ought to do the trick.

yuvipanda 15y ago

None of my computers have had a working DVD Drive for the las t 4-5 years and I'm yet to go 'damn I need a DVD Drive!"'

drivebyacct2 15y ago

Nice of them to tell us what some of us have known for sometime... I haven't used a DVD in... at least 4 years except for installing Office because it was $10 on optical media from my University. This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch + fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.

dangrossman 15y ago
It's a feature announcement on a product blog. It's supposed to feel like an ad.
chousuke 15y ago
I hadn't used DVDs in years either, but when I did need my DVD drive yesterday (I wanted to try out Arch Linux) I found out it's malfunctioning :/ I can burn the disc with it, but for some reason it refuses to read anything. To top it off, for some reason inserting my USB stick crashes the bootloader. rEFIt works perfectly fine until I put in the drive, then everything freezes.

yellowbkpk 15y ago

That was the longest way of saying "We now offer mailed USB flash drives as a restore option for up to 28GB of data." I've ever seen.

batista 15y ago
Yeah, saying that and also, you know, providing very insightful statistics related to DVD use and some historical data on the matter. The part of the article you somehow missed.

eli 15y ago

DVDs are ridiculously cheap to produce en masse. USB drives are getting cheaper, but it's not really the same ball park.

felipemnoa 15y ago

It will be great once USB Flash Drives become as cheap as DVDs. For one thing the memory of the flash drive will continue to increase while maintaining the same form factor. And for another they don' damage as easily as a DVD.

dangrossman 15y ago

Tangentially related: I really wish you could buy a pack of cheap flash drives the way you buy a pack of DVDs. At any given time, all the technology/office stores around carry a range of flash drives from $9.99 to $99.99. The capacity you get for a dollar goes up over time, but they never offer a drive for less than $10 (except the occasional advertised sale) or a package of multiple small drives for less than $10.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cabirum 15y ago
relevant: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/ http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/ Can't believe something like this does not exist yet.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Well, I have seen packs of SD/MicroSD cards, and built-in readers are fairly common...

oconnore 15y ago

Read-write media will never be as cheap as write-once-read-many media. Perhaps DVD's are on the way out, but their replacement will not come in the form of traditional USB flash drives. For example, Blu-ray discs are about $0.03 per GB, where a USB flash drive is approximately $1.00 per GB. Using flash memory for WORM style storage (like backups) is just silly.

ghshephard 15y ago
The cost differential only really makes a difference if you are backing up a lot of data - and if that's the case, you are likely backing up to a Drobo or something like that, and mirroring to BackBlaze for your offsite. Not saying _nobody_ backs up to Blu-Ray, but I'm guessing they are in the 1% of the population these days. What I'd really like, is for someone to come up with a practical form of Archival Media. Something that you could put on your shelf, and _know_ it would still be readable, 10,20,30,40 years from now. I often wonder whether these guys are for real: http://millenniata.com/ http://millenniata.com/
cabirum 15y ago
Silly? One USB drive can hold several backups, each new backup rewrites the oldest one. On the other hand, you need 30 DVDs/month (assuming daily backups, and a backup takes ~1 dvd), time to write them, and a space to store them. Also, it is way less reliable.
- oconnore 15y ago
  That scheme would be far less reliable. For one, if you corrupt a file and don't notice right away, you lose it forever (which sort of defeats the purpose of backups, doesn't it?). Also, you wouldn't actually do a full backup every day. You would perform data journaling with periodic snapshots. For example, with daily backups with a change rate of 5%, and monthly snapshots, you need only 2.5x your data size per month ignoring the minimal transaction overhead.
Terretta 15y ago
Er, tape is read write, and cheaper than your write once examples: 1600GB for $24.

noonespecial 15y ago

I keep a dvd drive on a shelf for "historical" purposes. Every once in a while I have to read one. Dvd jumped the shark right about the time I could download 4 gig in about the same time it took to read it off a crummy dvd-r.

dangrossman 15y ago
Watch how fast people start hitting Comcast's 250GB data cap in 2012 and on... especially after people start trusting online backup providers, Amazon Cloud Drive, etc with their files. That 250GB cap includes download and upload -- two months over the limit and you are terminated for 1 year, even if Comcast is the only ISP servicing your region. Watch one HD Netflix movie a night and you've used 105GB. Make a daily backup of a 5GB folder to a cloud service and you've now gone over your monthly cap. Goodbye internet. That's what keeps me from using online backup services. If everyone is going to start downloading 4GB DVDs instead of buying software in stores, too, something's gonna have to give.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  If you have a gigabit connection, you can use 250 GBytes in about 45 minutes. The solution is to make the networks faster, not avoid using them.
  - sbinetd 15y ago
    The solution is to be the only ISP in the area, and to strong-arm start-up competitors out of business with year-long contracts that force you to pay for months you have remaining upon cancellation. Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast) (Don't tell anyone)

epaga 15y ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum (1996)