I bought these not realizing if I can even use them.

They are 8GB per disc, but was initially intending to use these to save old photos and home videos.

My question is, would this work if I used on my PC? I read that you need some type of special burner.

Using a DVD burner for anything is, like, soooo 00's.

It's also just a totally archaic means of backing up files. Get yourself a nice little external SSD, that's what everyone uses these days.

Go buy a 512gb flash drive for $20 and call it a day.

Is this a thread from 2002?

Dvds/CD's whatever used to be the best for long term archiving because they are resistant to humidity/temp/light and blah blah.

I'd be more worried that in a few decades there will be no disc drives to view the content, or at least they may not be easy to get anymore.

Personally I'd forget about them and get a couple external drives and use a reputable cloud service for backups.

I do have 2 passports, that I have filled with backups of just files back in the day, but I read that these have only like a 3-5 lifespan then die.I actually did this too, but it got corrupted (could still view and copy from, but couldn't save to) am formatting it as we speak. Will save everything in one go without taking it out once it's done. I think it said those have a lifespan of 8 years.

While technically, I can use ******** to store photos and videos (sort of, some got flagged for copyright, even though it was just the radio). I just want a place to have them safe and sound, so I was hoping I could use CDs since those last forever. I have some from mid 2000s (?) That are 4gb And I can still view them no issue.

I like taking photos and am even going to print photos of me and my wife over the weekend on photo paper.

The worst thing that could happen is that all these just disappear.

That is a possibility. Like the floppy disk, right? lol good luck finding a computer that uses those still.

I do have the cloud but am just afraid that Google & ******** will just take a crap and delete everything.

I guess you could say, I am covering all fronts (just in case). My past memories are very important to me especially those moments with my wife.

In the next decade, I will buy a computer and probably won't be as fearful as I am, but right now my PC is from from 2012 (?), so need to find ways to get files to safe places.

Discs get disc rot. Look at Sega Saturn games.

Burnable discs have much shorter lives than standard discs.I've literally never corrupted a flash drive from formatting it.

Flash memory will lose data eventually. Just transfer it to another one.

Or get an actual HDD.

No, I meant I corrupted it (at some point), not sure how since the passports never got corrupted. Maybe when I shut off the computer? since it refused to be ejected.

So I am formatting it to retry saving everything. If it corrupts again, I know it's the flash drive with issues.

It would only get corrupted if you removed or disconnected it while saving data to it.

If you shut the computer down then it would finish what it is doing before powering down.

Microcenter often has sales where you can get like 5 256gb flash drives for $25ish. Just do that and save it to 3 of them for back ups.

Or save to a HDD. Barring mechanical failure, what's on those basically lasts forever.

I would have to install the HDD into my computer, but I am not tech savvy when it comes to that, like if I just want to move it over to a new PC or laptop, would that be possible (I'm learning as we speak, please bear with me)

Right now I have a 1TB thumb drive. That's pretty much what I'm going to do. Just save everything on it (once it's done formatting, it's like 1/40th of the way there), and forget about it for 5 years then rinse and repeat.

You could always just get one of those WD or Segate external HDDs that plug in via USB.

That's what I suggested lol, by far the most reliable option. They're very affordable now a days.

You can actually still buy a floppy disk drive which is pretty crazy.

So I don't think DVD drives will be going away anytime soon. But I'd still agree with the people who recommended an external HDD or external SSD. Those are easy to use and reliable. You just connect them via USB like Optimus and Jay said.

You could still make backups on DVDs, but keep the content on some type of hard disk as well.

OK so weird chit, I formatted it this morning. And started saving stuff to it. Got to around 70GB out of 1TB. Then the flash drive suddenly got an error message I think saying something location could not be found.

Now when I plug it into any computer (not just my old PC), it doesn't read anymore. I tried uninstalling my USB mass storage and restarting computer. The TB flash drive gets picked up by my computer in device manager, but it doesn't show up under "My Computer", so I can't select now. If I eject it and reinsert, it pops up for a split second then disconnects. It won't even allow me to reformat it now. Should I just take it to best buy to reformat it and return it? Or is this something that can be fixed?

What kind of flash drive is it? Did you buy it from amazon? It could likely be a fake, and errored out when trying to put more data on it then it can actually hold.

There are programs to verify the size of a device, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.

It looks like the Amazon post shows as unavailable, and I can't find it through searching.

But it's this one. LuckTiger 1tb, *Cheap Chinese Garbage.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/304899739874

Nvm found it:https://www.amazon.com/Lucktiger-Wat...dp/B0BWRRG8C9/

One of the 1-star reviews pretty much says the same thing lol, after 100GB, it died on them too.

Do you have any recommendations on a flash drive? I would trust the misc on a product over some dude on YouTube.

*Well I guess, you already said the Seagate external HDD. Should I buy that one, or do you have another product you prefer?

Also just realized for anyone as slow as I am reading this thread.

The flashdrive I used, took like 1hr to save a bunch of photos like multiple gigabytes worth.

Am using WD My Passport from 2020 to save the same stuff and it looks like it saved it in almost 60 seconds!! Damn quite the improvement. Didn't realize how fast this was until I used the crappy flash drive.