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What DVD format is best for archiving purposes?

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Xiaou2:
Realistically,   almost all optical discs go bad.   This ranges from decomposition chemically
to  other reasons.   They also can get scratched.   Hold an old audio cd up to the light, and
see how many pinholes you find - you will be amazed.   

 And then there is Outdated formats.   Such as when your 2x drive dies... and the new 54x
wont read your 2x disc correctly.    Or if you bought 2 of the same drives... the new OS wont
like the old drivers for them.


 But, I have found Hard drives make better backups.   Yes, HDs  can and do fail.  But what
are the odds of 2 drives failing at once?     Very slim.   Much slimmer than the chance your
optical media will fail somehow.

 Also,  HD's are a LOT Faster to back things up with.   No coasters.  No complex sorting and
dividing up file sizes.   Simply drag n drop,  or ghost the entire drive over.   

 The cost is usually a Lot cheaper as well.   A BlueRay disc may hold 25 gigs..  but it might
cost $15 a pop.    When you can get a 500 GB HD for $100.    That would mean you would need
$300 worth of BlueRay discs to match the 500gb HD.   And have all the hassle of dividing all your
data up in 25 gig sections.   And waiting for it all to burn.    And if you update things frequently,
youd blow thru discs like mad... where as a HD is much more reliable when erased.   (Re-writable cds only re-write so many times per area, and then become corrupted)

 
 You dont have to keep the drives hooked into the system either.  You could backup,  then
place them in a nice safe vibration proof box which you could even lock for security.


 The greatest reason why drive fail is due to heat.   Always place a good fan in front of
your drive (or backup drive)  as its in operation.   It should be a direct cool breeze at
all times.   Drives internal heads are micro small... and heat can expand metal... which
causes the heads to become mis-aligned... thus scratching the disc surface, and destroying
themselves in the process.   

 And HDs can get super hot inside, even when only ran for 5 min.   I had froze a drive in
the freezer for like 15 hrs cause it had the click of death.   I popped it on the system and tried to
get info off it... but the damn thing was nearly room temp in only 2 min flat   :(    Sadly,
most of the stuff was lost.     And after losing over 4 drives.. I learned the hard way about
cooling needs.   As well as about having backups.

 I personally prefer Not to raid a drive.  Instead, I copy the data myself at intervals.  Once a
month major backup.   And drag and drop important stuff immediately.    The problem with
raid is... if you get a virus... it will be duplicated to your drive immediately.     However,
if you have a  1month old OS backup,  you can simply pop that drive onto the system as
the new boot drive,  and your back up in a flash.

 Its best to unhook the power to the drives when not in use obviously.  For money sake,
and for anti-virus safety.


 I find it best to Keep an OS drive backup,  and a separate Data drive(s)  backup. 
If your motherboard does not have enough IDE/Sata  ports... then you can grab
a PCI card for like $60   to add more to the system.



 

SavannahLion:
You raise a lot of valid points to be sure, but I'd like to bring up a few of myself. I'm going to skip over the optical media portion and go straight to the hard drive.


--- Quote from: Xiaou2 on February 20, 2008, 09:41:36 am --- But, I have found Hard drives make better backups.   Yes, HDs  can and do fail.  But what
are the odds of 2 drives failing at once?     Very slim.   Much slimmer than the chance your
optical media will fail somehow.

--- End quote ---

It's a law of Murphy... or maybe it's Finagles... whatever. Given two drives of equal heritage (ie same manufacturing batch) and discarding extreme failures, the mean time between failures for the two drives will be very close to each other. Anyone who owns a car and replaced the headlamps on them will know exactly what I'm talking about. When one fails, the other is sure to fail and soon.


--- Quote --- The greatest reason why drive fail is due to heat.   Always place a good fan in front of
your drive (or backup drive)  as its in operation.   It should be a direct cool breeze at
all times.   Drives internal heads are micro small... and heat can expand metal... which
causes the heads to become mis-aligned... thus scratching the disc surface, and destroying
themselves in the process.

--- End quote ---

Incorrect. Modern drives have internal mechanism to compensate for heat expansion. I've run hard drives to the point where they're almost smoking and they've functioned as intended. Yes, you should always cool a hard drive as much as possible, they generate insane amounts of heat. But a HDD failure due to heat is no more or less likely than a HDD failing to excessive vibration. I'm not saying HDD's can't fail due to heat, I'm saying heat failure isn't the greatest reason for failure.

BTW, some hard drives are designed to intentionally land the disc head on the platter itself. Hence why you can never properly access sector 0 of a disc platter. If the head is designed to need a landing zone, sector 0 is where it goes. I recall research from about ten year ago utilizing polyester (the same polyester in those cheesy 70's pants) as lubricant for landing heads.

Not all drives land the head though. Some "park" the head in a kind of rack that suspends the head above the drive.


--- Quote --- And HDs can get super hot inside, even when only ran for 5 min.   I had froze a drive in
the freezer for like 15 hrs cause it had the click of death.   I popped it on the system and tried to
get info off it... but the damn thing was nearly room temp in only 2 min flat   :(    Sadly,
most of the stuff was lost.     And after losing over 4 drives.. I learned the hard way about
cooling needs.   As well as about having backups.

--- End quote ---

Funny, I read a post that describes that exact same experience not too long ago. That wasn't yours was it? Freezing the drive only works for some drive failures, not all of them. I think the reasons vary for why it works, but in the end that doesn't matter. On a dead drive, freezing the drive is something to try, but it's not a guaranteed solution. What I've done is pack the drive with silica packets in a sealed bag and run the drive in the ice. This at least minimizes heat issues and is a good way to thaw out that nights dinner. :P


I've grouped the following quotes together:

--- Quote ---And then there is Outdated formats.   Such as when your 2x drive dies... and the new 54x
wont read your 2x disc correctly.    Or if you bought 2 of the same drives... the new OS wont
like the old drivers for them.

--- End quote ---

--- Quote ---If your motherboard does not have enough IDE/Sata  ports... then you can grab
a PCI card for like $60   to add more to the system.

--- End quote ---

On a last note, you've denounced long term viability of optical media, specifically legacy reader support. Yet you later offer advice for hard drives that in no way guarantees legacy support down the road. In the last 25 years there have been a stunning array storage mediums and their interfaces that have come and gone. Much much more if you go back even further. And there is always the problem of advancing hardware and software leaving behind legacy support... including hard drives.

The problem is so real that some institutes are actually storing not just the hard drives, but the computers that can read them in room sized refrigerators and freezers. The facility I worked at does exactly that. Imagine their surprise when I asked where the manual for those computers were and what they were going to do about the batteries that are bound to die and leak inside. Imagine 50 years down the road, they need to recover data off one of those hard drives and no one remembers how to type on a keyboard.... Come to think of it... the computers they have in storage don't even have keyboards, mice or monitors. I guess I'll have to email them about it.

Anyhow, I digress. As long as you regularly use the media in question, you put yourself in a position to ensure you can move the data to new media, regardless of format, when that time comes.

Personally, I feel that a hard drive as long term storage for a high volume of data is a perfectly viable solution. People just need to be aware of the potential pitfalls that will face them in the long run.

zaphod:
Programs:  Keep a copy or two on CDs of each major program.  If they are a bunch of small apps, I archive as many as will fit on a CD and burn them off, and also keep a copy on a HD.  Chances are the programs will be obsolete long before your CDs become unusable.

Movies:  Just burn them off onto DVDs as .aivs (or whatever) and not worry about them.  You can probably get 5 to a DVD.  How upset would you be if you actually lost some of them?  Would you honestly go out and bother to 'replace' them?  Knowing how I am, I watch them once and that's it.

Personal data:  What I do is have some simple batch scripts that run nightly to XCOPY over new/modified files from designated directories (on a Datastore partition so they are easy to spot) to a backup drive in another machine.  I periodically burn off copies to DVD, keep one copy and send another offsite with my dad.  I am most interested in keeping pictures and home videos safe.  As I upgrade harddrives, I always create a DataStore (my name) partition and copy over the information from the old drive.  Procedure works well for me. 

Speaking of videos, what I have done is load each MiniDV into the PC with WinDV, make a second copy to a backup HD on the network, then send the original tapes offsite.  Videos of my children seem to warrant a little extra caution.

Having copies of your data offsite helps protect you in case of fire as we all know your standard safe at home won't protect your discs at all.

Xiaou2:

 Heat expansion compensation only goes so far.   While your drive may seem just dandy..  you
may have reduced the drives life expectancy by years,  from excessive heat.

 
 I speak on terms of pure experience:


 I had a  Re-Writable  cd drive:

 1) after several erases and re-writes...  the CD became corrupt and unreadable.
 2) disc burned at a low speed could not be read by the high speed cd player.
 3) many of the CDRs I have went dead due to the coating falling off them.
 4) many of my audio cds... while token care of well.. have pinhole scratches on the coating.
(while most play fine due to the way audio errors work, but if it were pc data,  it would be corrupted)


 Hard Drives:

 Ive had like 5 drives die on me Personally.   In every instance,  it was ALWAYS the drive that
was mounted directly above the bottom drive.   The heat rising from the bot drive COOKED the
top drive to early death.

 Upon installing massive airflow across all drives and putting 3/4" space between each..  Ive not
had a drive fail yet - and its been like 8yrs.   And I have 8 drives in my system currently, all in
operation.


 Also,  while there is the possibility that 2 drives in the same lot can go bad...  You can simply buy
alternating drives from different manufacturers, of from differing periods of time.   

 But Again,  what is the reality that BOTH drives would fail on the SAME DAY?!   If one drive goes dead,
you IMMEDIATELY grab a new drive and clone it over.   And, If this data is super important,  you can use
3 drives :P


 As for HD technology..  its pace is fairly slow compared to CD media.   Ive owned IDE drives, and now just
got a few Sata's.   Yet in that short time... Ive had multiple burners.   First the typical CDR burner... then
the RE-Writable drive,  and now a  DVD burner.    And thats not even counting all the damn revisions
of all of those drives.  Anything from  +/-   ,to disc speed compatibility... and more.     And then there
was HD-DVD  (plus and enhanced HD-DVD that they never let loose)  and now BLUE RAY...  and someday
down the line,  there will be a new format.

 Yet HDs barely changed at all.   All motherboard still support IDE.  And there are IDE to SATA adapters
if you prefer..  as well as PCI IDE adapter cards.    And by the time your IDE is obsolete... your IDE drives
wont even be worth hanging on to because they would be so small in comparison the cheapest newest
drives - to which you would have long switched over to.

 And again,  we are talking Cost ,  Ease, and Speed.   You cant beat the cost of HD backup - Period.  Even
with 3 drive setups.    You cant beat the speed aspect.  Nor can you beat the ease.

 
 I can also say that my HD backup system has saved my butt once already, due to a brand new 'defective'
HD  that failed shortly after all the data was installed on it.

boykster:
That's it, I'm starting a CD/DVD/HD -> punch card translation service!

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