CD-R

To continue the transplant donor process, my sister needed to send in the image CD she received from her CT scan. Wanting to keep a copy in case the original was misplaced, she asked me to burn a copy. CD-R’s were super popular a decade ago but today, not so much. If you wanted to store a lot of data offline, a DVD-R holds 4.7 GB vs. about 700 MB for a CD-R. For music, hardly anyone buys CD’s anymore; most music is from a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music.

I only had about 5 blank CD-R’s left from before but was able to make a copy of the image CD easily. There is a tool called Ashampoo Burning Studio that’s free and easy to use. Many years ago, when hard drive capacity was in the 1 GB range, I burned a lot of my video downloads to DVD-R to free up hard drive space. Now that I have a 6 TB drive on a network-attached storage (NAS) device, I’m copying files back from DVD’s back to the server for faster access. Maybe it’s all going on the cloud next.