Do yourself a huge favor: - Buy a pair of Seagate 500Gbyte external drives. I was at Fry's just yesterday ... in USB 2.0 only enclosures, these drives would cost $119 apiece; USB2/FireWire 400 enclosures and the price goes up to $190 right now.
- Move all the data from the CDs/DVDs to one of the drives. - Copy the entire drive to the other. - Backup new data, as you generate it, to both drives. - Dismount, disconnect, and unplug the drives when not in use for backup. When they become outdated by 1Terabyte drives at the same price, buy another pair and move the data to them. etc It's the most efficient, easily maintained, reliable backup/archive system available today. You can get some low-cost backup software that will make doing this job fast, easy, consistent and efficient. I do this myself, have been for five years now. It works flawlessly and is FAR easier to maintain than mountains of CDs and DVDs. And it's fast enough to actually be useful. Godfrey On Apr 21, 2007, at 7:03 PM, Mark Cassino wrote: > One of the things that was kicked around with the advent of digital > was > the need to move data from one storage medium to another as they > become obsolete. > > A couple of days ago ago I decided to move the data off 69 CD's, which > held the "best" of my *ist-D shots for the first few months I had it, > before getting a DVD burner. > > I have to say - it was more of a hassle than I expected. I have a > spare > computer here and just fed it the CD's as I was working on the main > PC. > The CD's were about 5 years old and none of them were bad - but some > read fairly slowly, sometimes taking up to 15 minutes to copy onto the > hard drive, vs 3 to 5 minutes for most. A couple failed with CRC > errors > on the first attempt, but then copied successfully after taking > them out > and wiping them with a lens cleaning cloth. > > Now I have 42 gigs of files to burn onto a few DVD's. > > My main motivation for doing this was to make it easier to find some > images - these CD's had the original PEF's plus 16 bit final TIFF's on > them, and the files came together in a way that left room for only > 5 or > 6 images per CD, with a fair amount of wasted space on each disk. > > Over all though, it took hours to copy these files. Since it was a > background task on a machine that I just use for scanning and > streaming > NPR, it wasn't a major problem. But I have roughly 700 more CD's that > someday will have to be moved - if not onto DVD's then onto some > future > media. > > The thought of that makes me shudder... > > - MCC > > -- > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > Mark Cassino Photography > Kalamazoo, Michigan > www.markcassino.com > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
