Be Excellent To Each Other

I mean don't get me wrong, 750gb external hard disks can be hella useful, but I have this paranoia about the thought that a hard disk may fail one day, which can be a huge loss if you had over 500gb+ worth of stuff on it that you failed to backup onto other media beforehand. Yes, I know DVDs and all that are just as likely to die, but I'm assuming most people here are smart enough to treat their discs with respect and not leave them riddled all over the floor or get scratched to buggery, which is all you have to worry about, right? Well, that and make sure no part of a disc physically cracks. ANYWAY...... it's probably best to have data on both HD and disc in case.


I mean I'm torn at the moment over whether to use HDs exclusively by next year, or experiment with BD-R along the way. With Blu-Ray becoming more of a standard (as much as I feel sorry for HD-DVD) I'm assuming burners are gradually becoming cheaper by the months, and a fiver-odd for a single 25gb disc to back up the odd romset collection or MPEGs/AVIs can't be too bad. What I do know for sure is that I can't keep using single-layer DVDs for much longer - 4.37gb is all too easily filled up in a matter of hours - if not minutes - these days. And I can't keep waiting any longer for decent, non-faulty dual-layer DVDs (of which printable ones don't appear to exist anywhere) to drop down in price - if Verbatim insist on continuing to charge £45 or whatever for a small cake of 'em then they can get fucked.

Hope this doesn't come out as an incoherent rant to all of you, but there can be room for both HD and BD on one's computer......... right? It's just a matter of time....

About 30% of my 0-3 year old DVDRs were all or partially unreadable when I moved to HDD very recently. They were kept in Caselogic wallet in my room the entire time. DVDs are write once, even DVDRW is not random access, they're 3-20 times slow to read and write, and 250 DVDRs takes up a fuckload more space than 2 3.5" SATA drives.

If you keep a double copy on HDD the chances of losing anything is tiny.

BD-R is going to very quickly become as constricting as DVD. You'd already need 4 of them for a MAME collection for example.

I have one of these - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Max-Value-eSATA ... 392&sr=8-3

It turns all new HDDs into external media, it's like having carts again. If I want to update a single file I can just copy it on in 2 seconds instead of rewriting the whole thing. If I want to replace lots of files a lot I can run sync toy.

Yes.

Aw, bugger. I think I'm regretting doing a 'mass backup' on DVD recently. I've only recently acquired a computer that burns DVDs, and had no idea that they were that unreliable.

I'm burning my original unedited pics onto CD's, and shrinking the ones of hard-drive to about 1024 pixels worth, due to limited space. (I have a titchy 75gig HD.) But! I can't help but think there should be some better option, like a memory stick of gigantasism. Or an external HD drive, if I weren't so afraid of it breaking and robbing me.

More than anything it's the degradation over time that makes CDR and DVDR a bad idea for backup. Have a quick Google and you'll see the issue. The inks just don't last over time in the same way a pressed CD or DVD does. And even they don't last that well according to "experts".

I'm suprised to see it over 0-3 years mind. I have 10 year old CDRs which are getting dodgy but 0-3 kept in a case out of sunlight I'm amazed at.

Hard disk solutions with redundancy is the way to go imo. Raid or just mirror what ever is your fancy.

Must be your choice of media brand, mate. I've got old TDK CDs and DVDs from as far back as '03/'04 (I believe I even have a few CDs from '02 too) that still perform very healthily to this day. Me and TDK seem to go a long way - I currently use their printable DVD-Rs for instance. And I've used Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden in the past - I make sure I read all the reviews and only go for trustworthy brands. Bit difficult if you really need dual-layer, however.


Only if you really feel the need to own every single CHD game that is. If you're only interested in one or two CHD titles (and if they're ones that happen to perform decently under MAME, let's not forget) then you'd need a lot less than 4. Similarly with ISOs and similar files - I'm not going to want every single game ever, just the ones that grab my interest.


Now these things I've heard of before and I'm very impressed. Are there any IDE-compatible devices though? I've got a few old HDs left laying dormant on a shelf still and hope to try and access the old data on them once more in the future.

for a great backup, convert all your files to binary, print them out, out em in the lanch ship, take off and nuke the site from orbit....

I backup to HD with a secondary backup to DVD. If you buy shit media don't expect it to last.

...it's the only way to be sure

Every week I've been meaning to back a load of stuff up.. every week.. but I never get around to it.

This Sunday... for surel!

I use DVDs still but I am leaning towards buying a second external HDD to back stuff up to. I also have a ton of 1gig memory sticks from work (don't tell the boss...) so I usually save stuff to them and then forget what's on them.

Edit - I've just realised my post added nothing to the original conversation... oh well. Sorry.

I just have a script that backs up anything worth backing up across my network to the other PCs overnight. The chances of them all failing at once isn't very high unless the building suffers catastrophic damage and frankly the data isn't that important.

Given the rapidly falling cost of memory, it shouldn't be too long before just buying new SDHC cards will be enough to solve everyone's problems. Unless of course there's some sort of problem with the retention on them that I don't know about. Oh, plus they're a right bugger to label up with 8GB's worth of file information.

It might just be emblematic of the time I spent on dial-up connections, but even though I can now realistically wait around ten whole minutes to download an entire 700MB Xvid movie, I still feel the need to back everything up onto DVD-R. Largely that's because a lot of the stuff I want to keep hold of may never be put online ever again (say, three hours of verbatim American MTV from 1983, or early 1980s ITV continuity), but mainly because I'm going to wake up one day and it was all a dream, that ADSL2+ never happened, and it'll take me three entire days to torrent a workprint of Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, even though I'll still pay to see it in the cinema and to import the R1 DVD.

The main flaw in this plan is that with modern download speeds (as well as the dozens of hours of entertainment I'm PVRing yet never going to get the time to watch every week), I'm never going to feel the need to delve into my uncatalogued (and dusty) collection of recordable discs while they're still readable. That said, when I have dipped into my collection of old discs purchased from Tandy, they've been surprisingly sturdy. I've recovered a few nuggets from the interweb of the 1990s, such as the original The Weekly, or my quite justifiably ignored websites Gamebroth, Reality Asylum and Xbollox, as well as all the stuff I'd put on early-era B3TA. I can't really see the 22nd Century equivalent of Tony Robinson uncovering many CD-Rs and expressing wonder at the contents when we're all long dead, though. It's much more likely he'll say "Pfft! "Windows"? What the ruddy fuck?" and chuck them onto a pile of unused Zunes.

Not to mention that their access speed is significantly slower than both HD and CD/DVD, especially when moving lots of little files over. Indeed, little files take up a lot more disk space on a memory card too, though that could just be down to its use of FAT.

Yes, SOME of mine from that long were fine. I found CDs are CONSIDERABLY better than DVDs.

Recommended is TeraCopy which unlike explorer is able to (just about) skip just the files that don't work on a disk.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Another tactic would be to use PARSets, if you lose a file you can probably recover it using the others.
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/



I don't believe the IDE standard mandates consistent placement of the plugs on the back of the drive, the SATA one does.



To a degree, they're still slower and probably more fragile than the HDD.

As for labelling, just stick a number on there and use Where is it? http://whereisit-soft.com/

You're right, the IDE one doesn't, as I found out to my cost when trying to replace the drive in an external DVD enclosure.

The completion of that thought of course being that it would make it somewhere between difficult and impossible to do a "Cartridge" type system such as the one linked, sadly because I'd quite like an IDE one myself.

I am pleased that TDK is a reliable brand. Handily, Poundland seem to sell TDK DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs, of which I've noticed that DVD-Rs are much faster at writing to. Unless I've got some settings wrong.

Would still like an external hard drive for back-ups though. Maybe one day...

I don't about disks or settings in this case of course but there's no paticular technical reason for one being faster than the other.

-R is Chinese and +R is Scottish?*

*I DON'T HAVE A FUCKING COAT.

If you use Winrar for your backups, you can create recovery volumes in case part of the file fails.

Which for those not technical is what I was referring to when talking about PAR sets further up.

I did see that which is why I mentioned Winrar as you can then do the compression and PAR sets all in one go.

I prefer to

I didn't actually know Winrar could do that, I might start doing that as a matter of course for compressed things.

Well it creates a recovery volume (or multiple volumes) if you ask it nicely. IIRC these are PAR files but you may need to use WINRAR to be able to extract them. I have used them once with a bad DVD and it got the data back.

I BACKUP NOTHING AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME

Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!?!?!?

To be fair, I do back up uni work.

If your university tutors were anything like mine, I don't blame you.