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Keep optical media or trash

T

Tech198

Cancelled
Original poster
Mar 21, 2011
15,915
2,151
Hi all..

Got a MBA, and was wondering weather i should copy everything onto my local external hard drive and keep optical media in a safe place.

Reason being, i never us optical media, but i my former MacBook Pro, i have dome customized Boot CD's repair.. stuff. and general miscellaneous stuff.

I do have one large external drive, so I could probably make .iso images of these discs and keep them on had drive, when needed...

However, i also may need them for booting other people's system's to fix, (mates etc)

So would it be better to keep them, or make a CD-RW of them (as needed) ?

FYI. I also dunno about getting the Superdrive for MBA, since 99% of the time optical storage is never used.
 
M

mj1108

macrumors 6502a
Apr 7, 2007
642
481
California
I had contemplated getting the SuperDrive as well, but then found I had a Toshiba external USB DVD drive that I had got for under $50 and it worked just fine with my MBA. I'm not sure if the SuperDrive has something that a regular external USB DVD drive doesn't, but it's something to consider.
 
Agent-P

Agent-P

Contributor
Dec 5, 2009
2,502
23
The Tri-State Area
If you don't think you'll need to use the optical media often enough, then I'd say you should be okay just ripping the .ISO images and storing them on your external hard drive. One thing I would do though is keep them stored in multiple places since if you no longer have the physical media, you don't want to lose your .ISO images if the external hard drive fails. And if you need to use them for a friend, burning them to a CD/DVD is simple enough. As you noted, you'll need to get an external drive then for those discs. You can find some decent ones for relatively decent prices. Though I can't recommend any specific ones since I'm using the superdrive from my old MBP in an external enclosure.
 
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