pouët.net

You could get a 16GB SD card / thumb drive.

I already have. I think I'm paranoid about losing data. And it's easy for the USB interface or the Flash memory to fail, not to mention deletions by viruses, and the fact they're so small they can be lost easily, and (this) and (that) and.. AAAGH!

I got more (original and burned) CDs eaten by time than USB sticks. How many dead USB sticks do you have?

I've had a few. I hated the fact they suddenly stop working, just like that, and NONE of the data is retrievable.

At least with DVDs I can still salvage part of the data, or if it won't be read, try it in another drive - they're all slightly different.

Heck, if they can take video of a vinyl record's groove and convert it into WAV files, then they can surely optically scan the data surface of a DVD+R! I bet it'd be cheaper than trying to salvage HDD contents after hardware failure, too!

You are aware that this is basically how DVD works to begin with, I hope?

What I mean is a method of reading those discs thoroughly (like HDD data recovery), when they fail in ordinary drives during ordinary use. It seems silly to chuck them away just because of the latter when a more thorough scan would easily recover the data.

As it is, it's more likely that the data will become outdated long before it's unreadable - that's the only problem with recordable DVD. And I would never use DVD-RW neither.