Best Buy will stop selling DVDs in its physical and online stores starting in 2024. The announcement, described as “end of an era” Taking into account the relevance of a large American retailer, a similar one follows in terms of music CDs, the closure of the Netflix rental and generally other industry movements that confirm the decline of optical drives as a means of distribution as well as for storing information.

Best Buy’s decision responds to known reasons. The growth in the use of digital download and/or streaming technologies is unstoppable, which has caused major changes in the distribution formats of multimedia content, especially music and video. The delivery of software programs on physical media is already priceless, and in terms of games, the trend is for digital to completely impose itself on media.

As a result, sales of optical drives suffered a huge drop. And it may soon be difficult to find empty drives to record information. Best Buy’s announcement gave us a reason talk about optical media and its future survival, because if you have been in the field of computer technology for several years, you surely have a large number of CDs/DVDs that you use little or not at all. And not stored in the best conditions, because not all of us store them conveniently in boxes, and there were many stacks of 50 or 100 units where the discs were placed on top of each other.

Are optical drives dead?

It has been raining since the massive use of floppy disks in the 1980s and 1990s as an external storage standard on computers or as a distribution format for software or video games. The advent of the CD-ROM meant a an impressive leap in the storage industry and reduced the use of the floppy disk, which has practically disappeared today. CD-ROM evolved into recordable and rewritable CDs (CD-R/CD-RW) and then DVD. Once widely used, their use is declining in all industries including audio CDs for music.

When it comes to high-definition optical formats, Sony managed to establish Blu-ray as the standard after a fierce battle with Toshiba. Sony won the battle but lost the war. Despite its high capacity and potential The format was not used as expected and only its inclusion on consoles or for the few who buy movies in this format was able to sustain it. But until when?

on computers, CD/DVD usage is in leaps and bounds, while Blu-ray has gone unnoticed. The very high price of BD media, more moderate for readers, prevented their spread, along with the unstoppable trend of cloud storage and digital distribution of operating systems, applications and games.

Thanks to this and increasing the capacity and speed of hard drives SSD drives or USB flash drives, everything points to the end for optical mechanics at least on a mass scale. Few, very few new computers today include optical drive readers or writers.

The world of video games It is special and its operation has somewhat escaped the trend for reasons of reselling, collecting, sharing or playing without the need for download or internet. However, digital distribution platforms for PC such as Steam have been a huge success and continue to grow, pointing to the changes that have occurred in other types of content. Digital downloads are a growing phenomenon and are becoming more prominent, along with cloud gaming and streaming.

How long does this optical media last?

There is no exact figure for the lifetime that optical discs can achieve. A few years ago, the Canadian government published a study on the subject which, while technically quite complete, did little to answer the question as it concluded very broadly: from 2 to 200 years of life.

A lot of it will depend on initial production quality. Production in the peak years was enormous to meet demand and lower prices, and certainly most of the units that made it to market were not of the best quality and chemical degradation between the various layers that make up optical discs could be accelerated. In fact, in the study, longevity varies greatly depending on the brand used.

How to make copies of optical drives?

If you think you have relevant information stored (you never know what might come out of a recording recorded 20 years ago), music collections or other content on compact discs, it might be time to get down to the task of saving it before it’s too late.

hand copy. The easiest way to back up old data on a drive is to transfer content to a hard drive, solid state drive, flash drive, NAS or cloud storage directly from File Explorer. This manual copy can be done from any operating system by creating separate folders on the target drive for better organization.

Disk images. Sometimes you come across a disc in the right state, but it can’t be read by the operating system you’re using because it’s not compatible. Disc images are ideal for these occasions as they can copy the structure of the optical disc, including all file data and the file system (if any) so that it can be replicated to another new disc later if you ever want to use it. . As we have seen in this practical article, there are good applications for this.

Ability. The capacity required to create backup copies will vary greatly depending on the user and the number of drives being managed, bearing in mind that a typical CD takes up 700MB and a DVD ranges from 4 to 17GB. We’d leave Blu-rays aside because of their huge capacity and – we assume – they must still be in good condition since they’re newer. Personally, I did a cleanup a while ago and used hard drives I removed from computers by replacing them with SSDs, cloned music discs from my collection and uploaded professional files that appeared to the cloud.

Readers. The sharp decline in CD and DVD use amid the general decline of physical content distribution formats has put optical disc players on the brink of extinction, and most new devices no longer contain them. Fortunately, external players/recorders are affordable, can be purchased for less than 20 euros and work in USB ports on any computer.

What if the disc has errors? If you have discs recorded 10, 15, 20 years ago, you will probably encounter errors on some units. Depending on your grade, there are several ways to act. The first is to try it with other readers, as it is not uncommon for one to be able to read it and another not. We would then copy all the data we can save. For the rest, we can use data recovery software like IsoBuster. It works the same way we saw when recovering files from PC.

We can’t go any further there. If the data is incredibly important and irreplaceable, you can hire a professional (very expensive) forensic data recovery service to mine what’s left of it. Or what they can, because if they have physical damage to the lower layers, there may be nothing to do. Not even with the toothpaste trick, which does not go beyond the thorough cleaning that is mandatory for optical discs, as well as being careful when handling and storing them as safely as possible.

Ultimately, it is the medium that ends up degrading. If you have stacks of optical discs, it’s best to start saving important data before it’s too late.