I donated some spindles of burned media and programs to Salvation Army expecting they'd throw 'em out. They're selling 'em for $3.

yukichigai@kbin.social to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 605 points –
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If you are donating stacks of discs to a thrift store, make sure there's nothing on them you don't want to give away first. I bought a pack of CDs from a thrift store a while ago. I checked a couple at the top of the stack before I bought them and they were blank. I used about half of them without issue and when I put the next one in the drive, it mounted and opened. Someone gave away a whole bunch of banking info and tax records. I used them for target practice, but someone certainly could have used that info for identity theft if they chose to.

I went through every single disc before I donated them, yeah. Actually I did some organization so one spindle was all Anime, another was all SciFi, so on.

...found a fair bit of porn. I kept the porn. TV series are ephemeral. Porn is eternal.

Not optical disks, though. Especially burnables. They have a shelf life. Make sure to replicate the data in time.

It is so depressing how much I lost as a kid.

My backup method was almost entirely optical. Oh well. I’ve kept myself from feeling too bad by keeping in mind that I am waaaaay too lazy to ever go digging through it anyway.

Good point. For all I know I've got the last viewable copy of "Sodomy Cream Pies" in existence.

Better share the love while you can.