Roy Tang

I find myself staring at stacks of old CD-Rs in my room that are just there taking up space. As far as I know, they contain copies of old TV series/anime I used to watch and backups of my old hard drives from time long past. (I’m pretty sure I still have backups of my drive contents from the IRC laboratory in UP.)

I’m wondering whether I should bother going through them to check which ones are already useless (as some certainlty already are). If I’m going to rearchive them into a different format it would probably take more than a week to reburn them to DVDs. But DVDs are soon to be obsolete with the coming of Blu-Ray, maybe I should just buy another external drive and archive them there? I could easily buy another hard drive with the capacity of somewhere around 200-300 CDs.

I’ve had a pack rat mentality ever since I first bought a CD burner back in the day, but lately I’ve found myself unenthusiastic about backing up _anything _to optical media. I had to backup the factory settings on this laptop to a DVD (because the Acer software didn’t have an option to backup to an external HD), but aside from that I haven’t burned any discs in half a year maybe.

Maybe it’s just due to my bad experience with failed CD writers and DVD writers that are slow as hell to burn, but I’ve pretty much given up on optical media. High failure rates, low life expectancy, insanely long writing times and difficulty of transfer and storage, I probably would prefer an additional external hard drive. Granted, hard drives fail as well, but at least you didn’t spend a hundred thousand hours writing stuff to it in case it does.

Or I could just (heaven forbid) toss out most of the stuff I normally archive; TV and anime episodes especially. After all, when was the last time I went through all the old episodes of Rurouni Kenshin? I barely have enough time to watch the current shows I follow, there’s probably no chance of me watching those old shows again. And even if I do get a hankering to watch season one of _Smallville _again, it’s not like it would be hard to find either online or IRL.

One could argue that I could keep the copies on disc in case someone wants to borrow them from me. But frankly, every other person now keeps his own stash of old episodes, and there are better people to borrow from than me.

Side note: I’m pretty sure the tendency to archive, compile and categorize everything is a symptom of NADD.

I’m almost done convincing myself now, maybe I _will _toss out those old discs…