On Tuesday 27 April 2010 14:56:01 Sean Dague wrote: > On 04/27/2010 11:11 AM, Joseph Apuzzo wrote: > > As you can see for that price one can backup 1Tb formidably having both > > remote and local backup. > > > > ( please note Internet backup of 1-2Tb is NOT affordable, not what I am > > talking about here ) > > Backups are only as good as your media. My general understanding of > consumer writable CD/DVD discs is they are really only rated for a > couple of years, after which point your mileage may vary in your ability > to get data back off of them.
There are different ratings for CDR's depending on the material used to make them; supposedly the gold-colored ones last the longest and are rated for about 9 years. However regardless of rating, experimentally I have plenty of generic CDR's that were written from 1998 that can still be read, so I personally put at least some faith in optical media as a backup solution. The main problem I run into with CDR's is when the top coating de-laminates from the CD, so storage environment is important for longevity. I generally just keep old CDRs in spindles near my Desktop computer. The main advantage of optical media for backup is in speed of accessing the data via random reads, rather than serial reads for tape. Tape backup is known to be more reliable, but slower, and harder to hand to someone else if you needed to. > I assume the rule would apply to blueray as well, as it seems to be > roughly the same kind of material. > > -Sean Not sure. Blue Ray seems to have some kind of ferromagnetic material in it, which I've never heard of being within CDR's. http://www.betterconcerts.com/tag/ferromagnetic-material The main way I've been doing my own backup right now (besides backup hard disks) is via burning Dual-Layer DVDs. I still would prefer this option only because almost anybody can read a DL-DVD, but Blu-Ray hardware is still a bit more rare for people to have. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium May 5 - Crack and LLVM Jun 2 - Android Jul 7 - Patent Absurdity - The Movie
