I use a combination of hard drive backups (done daily) with a program
called Carbon Copy Cloner (macintosh only.) and CD's/DVD's Critical
files go on CD or DVD (no problems yet!) and I keep these off site
in my safe deposit box...other people I know have their off site
copies stored at trusted family/friend's houses. This really saved a
colleague of mine...he lost his business in a fire here in LA and was
back up and running very quickly because he had his files backed up
and offsite.
Best,
Karen
At 01:24 PM 10/9/04 +0200, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
How safe do people consider DVD-Rs as a backup media? Safer/Unsafer than
CD-Rs (which are not all that safe from my experience).
Yes, you're right. I always do double backups. Though I haven't had any bad
reads yet (my CD-R data archive goes back to 1997), they are stored carefully.
The DVD-Rs seem better protected than the CD-Rs in simple physical
manufacturing terms, with heavier protection of the reflective layer. On
the other hand, the data density means scratches come into play. I have to
use DVD-Rs for larger projects because some of the source materials and
manipulations for electronic music would take a dozen CD-Rs. They also hold
video project backups.
Though CD-Rs have gone through (and failed) testing (I think I referenced
here a particularly rigorous Dutch test with discouraging results), I have
not seen any serious data reports on DVD-Rs -- only because the 'advanced
aging' tests don't seem to match the real-world aging results. That's what
happened with the CD-Rs, and I expect it to be the case with DVD-Rs.
I keep backups of critical material on hard drives, too. It's kind of
discouraging, because there's a sense that archives of source material of
all kinds will be deteriorating (or becoming obsolete) much faster than in
the paper and film days. I try to keep material available for later use,
but updating from cassettes to 5-inch floppies to 3-inch to CD-Rs to DVD-Rs
just consumes too much time -- not to mention licenses, operating systems,
hardware boards & boxes, computers, etc., that have to be kept around to
use older material.
Example: I thought I was safe in committing my entire performance art/music
installation "In Bocca al Lupo" from 1985 to EPROM and flash RAM -- no
floppies, no hard drives. It turned out both the EPROMs and flash RAM
self-erase after a decade or so, so the installation and its data (it was a
self-learning installation) are gone. I have the source code printed out,
but the chance of replicating the project is pretty low.
Since my use of technology in my music goes back to 1969 and computer
technology back to 1977, you can bet I have, as they say, "issues". Just
what I would NOT need right now would be premature failure rates with DVD-Rs!
Dennis
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