Should I compress my files before burning them to disc ?

[Subzero99]

I've been thinking about it and 40GB's can easily be burned to about 9 standard DVDs. But if I do this should I zip or rar my files before burning them to disc ? I have about 40GB worth of mp3's and JPEG pictures. I would like to burn them to about 9 DVDs for safe keeping and long term storage. So instead of burning 1000's of small individual files was wondering if it would be best to compressed the files into 2-4GB large compressed files and just burning 1 or 2 large files to a disc ?

 

I know some will say just buy a portable HDD but these files is something I don't change often or look at and burning 9 DVDs will be cheap. Portable HDDs have moving parts and break or get corrupted. Then again in 10 years will we still even use disc drives or even be able to buy them. A well burned disc can last very long. I'm not 100% about my decision so if you want to give me your two cents on top of answering my original question. Also well if I use the WinRAR program I can use the "Add the recovery record" option.

 

I guess I should mention I do have two 64GB USB thumb drives. I was going to use them for backing up but I was reading that using USB thumb drives as backing stuff up long term isn't very reliable. When I read that, that's why I was thinking of going to DVDs, but thinking of burning discs just feels weird in this day and age.

Edited October 28, 2016 by Subzero99

[dbminter]

If you compress this list of files, you do run a higher risk of being unable to access them all.  If one KB of that archive is corrupted due to being unable to being read off an optical disc, then you may not be able to access any of the files after that point in the archive stream.  So, I'd just burn the many singular files to a disc.  That way if part of the disc becomes corrupted, then you only lose X number of files at that point.  Files elsewhere on the disc that aren't on corrupted sectors can still be recovered.

 

 

And if you have thumb drives, those are also viable.  If you never plan on updating the files, then you don't have to worry about the moving parts of an external HDD.  And if you don't add any more files to the flash drives, you don't run the risk of the flash being unreadable.  I know flash drives have a finite number of writes in their life span.  But, I don't know if reading files from a flash drive does any kind of "damage" to it.  Meaning, can flash drives be read indefinitely as long as no further writes are made to them?  If that's the case, then the flash drives might be a better choice.  Plus, the flash drives have higher capacities available versus optical discs.  You can get 256 GB flash drives, however they are more expensive than, say, a BD-R XL.  Plus, BD-R XL maxes out at 125 GB.  And with multiple layers, multiple layer discs have a potential for failure before single layer media.