Burning Nostalgia
Free disk space has a tendency to shrink. Even if you create nothing and prefer consumption. People love their precious data whatever it consists of and want it to be stored, conveniently and safely. I am not an exception here. Oh, my wonderful files! My splendid jpegs, enchanting wavs and flamboyant mp4s! I need all of you, that’s for sure. Even those which I completely forgot about.
Here’s what I was doing back in the day. I took a blank DVD from a providently prepared pile and put it into a DVD-ROM. Then, I launched the special software that handled one specific task — recording data on discs. The process was called burning, which I still find rather poetic. When the work was done, the program greeted me (not in all cases, errors happened) with a victorious message: “Burn process completed successfully.” While on the subject, this kind of application still exists, so it’s possible to recreate the ancient experience nowadays.
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Another thing that I had at hand was a set of round stickers with holes in the center. Using a thin pen, I wrote on them something like “Keine Mautstraßen music video work folder, part 1” or “Different Listening: cover artwork + mp3” and then stuck it to a corresponding disc, hot from the oven (they really got heated during the recording). So I knew what was exactly on each DVD. Now, when I keep my archives on external drives, I can’t be absolutely sure which one exactly contains, let’s say, source files for a poster I made ten years ago. I can’t use stickers with HDDs — the bloody objects are too tiny! And even if I could, what would I write? Probably, “A part of the whole archive, except for the stuff which is on other storage devices.”
Of course, that old method of data preserving was not optimal in terms of size and form, as well as durability, capacity and pretty much everything else. But it was not as bad as it looks from our technologically advanced, AI-infused, and perfectly comfortable today. I had a nice-looking and tactile-pleasing special bag (similar to the one depicted above) for taking my discs with me on occasional trips. I can’t remember how many of them it was able to hold (twenty? forty?), but definitely enough. It wasn’t small, yet it wasn’t huge either. And it was yellow — an undeniably strong benefit.
The ride was mostly joyful, apart from a few sad episodes when a disc became entirely or partially damaged. The media was quite fragile — accidental scratches on the undersurface could ruin it without a chance of restoration. It wasn’t hard to physically break a DVD into pieces with bare hands (although this action required obviously bad intentions). A failure of a disc or two was mournful, but it was nothing in comparison to a tragic loss of an entire hard drive. Considering that, those thin glossy circles possibly spared some people nervous breakdowns, tears and sorrow. A classic case of not putting all your eggs in one basket!
I am not saying it was perfect (nothing is). I don’t imply it was better than contemporary means of data storing (well, maybe just in the aspect of awesomeness). But when I recently saw my free disk space dwindling again, I got a flashback from the years when the word burning had a cool and fun meaning. And this recollection was surprisingly warm — like a freshly recorded DVD.
