Are DVDs done as a backup medium?

The floppy disk had a great run. From the day they replaced paper tape and magnetic tape, they wowed users with their random access and huge capacity; through successive reductions in size and doublings of capacity, they became such a symbol of storage that they live on as the menu icon representing "save".

Of course, the floppy disk is dead and gone, you knew that. To illustrate: the current standard for digital cameras is 10 megapixels. Just ONE photo from this kind of camera will not fit on a standard 1.44M floppy. There is no problem left for which a floppy disk is the best answer.

I postulate that DVDs are nearly dead in the same way. Although they're the largest storage medium around at a reasonable price (Blu-ray is still premium rated as I write this) hard disks are so cheap and easy to use, that there's no real saving in using DVDs.

Hard disks have come a long way. The first could store 5 or 10 MEGAbytes. The increase has been so rapid that people still talk about 500 MEGAbyte drives, when they mean 500GIGAbyte drives. The latest 1TERAbyte drives are 100,000 times bigger than the first ones; a 1.5Tb drive is a million times larger than a floppy disk.

Imagine you have a few hundred megabytes to store, and compare the task of storing it on DVD's or an external USB pluggable disk drive. The disk drive is still more expensive. As I write this, perhaps $100 (CAD/USD) for 1 Terabyte. If you buy two, you can alternate your backups, and get a really good level of security, beyond those scratchable DVDs. And it's easy... you just plug it in, and copy!

Compare a stack of DVDs. True, they're cheap. A stack of 100 could be $25 to $40, and would store around 400Gb. But look at the effort involved in swapping out all those DVDs: how much is that trouble worth? And how long does it take? And how many times are you going to back up? I think the DVD is dead.

You might point out that DVDs will still live on as a way to play movies. But we're now in the age of the media player. I have a box that will simply play a movie from a flash drive or USB hard disk to my TV. I don't need DVDs any more. And a friend has a Playstation that can play media over a wireless network. No, the DVD is dead. Goodbye!