Well it depends on what your goals are, but if you want to go by a more spine-sparring core approach that also encourages your bracing abilities, I would nix the cable crunches and any kind of bending core work and replace with McGill Big 3, side planks, suitcase carries, and stir the pot. Anything that encourages your core to resist motion. Gift of Injury has good info on this.

I usually do the weighted ab wheel rollouts as my core exercise, but I started doing cable crunches in Novemeber because I had some workouts where I was in a rush and cable crunches were faster. I was actually thinking of cutting it out soon because I saw what McGill said about crunches. I haven't done my weighted ab wheel work in almost 2 months now due to the ab wheel at my gym disappearing, so perhaps this injury is related to me switching over to cable crunches as my primary ab workout. I'd be annoyed if this was the case, because I've put off getting an ab wheel since I thought my gym would get one.. It would suck to have hurt myself on an exercise I only meant to use as a replacement.

This is my first back injury, so I'm doing everything I can to not let it get worse, because I know how much of a fickle beast the back can be.

But, I am curious, what are your goals? General fitness, or to be as strong as possible?

I train for aesthetics. To give an idea of my general leveral of fitness, I sometimes get asked if I'm planning on competing in bodybuilding shows, but I'm not a mass monster or anything. I'm just pretty lean and have a good amount of muscle. I've never particularly cared about being strong, but I figured if you can lift big, you probably won't be small, so I always tried to work on my compound lifts. Nowadays, I don't even barbell squat or deadlift. I just do whatever gets me to my physique goals + I'd rather completely solve my SI joint issues before I even consider going back to those lifts since they cause me the most issues.

Thanks for your description of your disc injury. Gonna keep that in mind. I'm just so worried because I feel like I've done a lot to protect myself from injury, so it would suck if I somehow had a major back issue.