Millhouse, Yeah. I hear bad things about CD-R backups all the time, I have no idea whether DVD media are any better. You've got to hope that being "next generation" that they learned from at least some of their mistakes with the CD media but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I might well end up "refreshing" my archive every 6 months, partly because of the potential issues you mention (and your warning has encouraged me to take this more seriously), but also because the inevitable tagging errors will mean that the backups will get out of date. Right now I'm keeping a text file where I record any tag changes so that, if I have to restore from backup, I have a record of what tag updates I need to apply after I've done the restore. Admitedly recutting my backups will be a pain to do, my backup set currently numbers 38 DVD+Rs, but as long as I remember to set a DVD burn going whenever I pop out for lunch, go to the gym, watch some TV, go to bed, etc then I think that when the time comes and I set my mind to it I could probably cut at least 4 a day during these dead times so it would be a 10 day project to regenerate the backup set, maybe less, and to be honest it's one of those mindless projects that I find quite therapeutic (in moderation). I won't disagree with your statement that "Backing up to another hard disk is probably the most cost effective..." because it depends on how you trade off cost vs effectiveness but, so long as I don't re-cut my backup sets more often than once every 6 months, it is hard to beat DVD+Rs on cost alone. My total backup set will have cost me about £7.50 in blank media so I'd have to recut the backup set quite a few times to get to the cost of an additional 200GB external drive. Also, I have so many power bricks and plugs in my home office already (I just counted, I have 27 power cables and power bricks active in my office right now!) that I am very loathe to add yet another device into my system if I can avoid it. My long term plan is that in 2 years I hope to be able to add some sort of squeezebox-like system for my DVDs so at that point ripping DVDs will need a total rethink on my storage and I will use that as the trigger to upgrade my 500GB external drive to a > 2TB external RAID array which I hope will be pretty affordable by then and that Blu-ray blank media will also be affordable so that the number of discs in my backup set remains constant or even reduces. - Julian -- JulianL _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
