I have backups on optical. Estimated 6PB of important data. Things like website archives/databases, various projects, family pictures/videos/audio, and whatever miscellaneous. The media I use is all ALT 100 year certified or better. To lesser extent of importance, all the software, movies, audio cds, and video games(if you didn't know, there is no such thing as a 100% accurate rom dump for cartridge media and no such thing as a 100% accurate disk image with most forms of DRM, although 98-99.99% is damn good and way better than previous eras format generation-loss.)
So what I see happening, is one day being complacent, ignoring this segment of storage, then in 30 years or so it's going to be a big headache to recover media because the high end optical drives are long gone and supplemented with barely usable ones just to fill a niche in the market. Right now, good optical drives are still cheap, SATA(and to same extend PCIe bused), PATA, SCSI(all) all can be converted and retain full accuracy(maybe not speed) to other formats, including USB.
Because of that, because I know I can still find a lot of uses for optical media, every machine I buy, I go ahead and get a decent optical drive. The downside is another 12v mechanical device that consumes space and requires maintenance and post recognition for most motherboards. Then when we have independent ALT ratings on media that start to consistently beat that 100 year mark, I'll swap over completely.
ALT stands for accelerated
life
test, because it's a best guess using age simulation environments. And cloud storage for everything is full of holes and issues(unless your archive data isn't valuable).
Yes, I do. I used it to install Windows 10 when I built my rig. I also need to occasionally use the CD drive for work purposes. Other than that, it would never be used.
This is a good point. While USB/Flash is better for speed, having your store bought OS disc is going to outlast a USB drive sitting in a drawer. Sure, these are becoming archaic methods and I don't install anything from optical on non-legacy systems, but the general rule of thumb for data is BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! and for an OS install, that is as good as any of a backup method.