Bummer

[azekeil]

CDRs no good for long term storage?

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I think the claim of ten years for reputable brands is realistic - about 1 in 3 of the 15-year-old CD-Rs I know of is still intact.

For archiving, I use Verbatim/TDK. The cheapy discs are only useful when you want to post someone half a gig.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Some of my friends won't be happy to hear this. Good thing I'm going for online (as in HDDs) storage now *sigh*

[dylan.livejournal.com]

I've just got hold of a 4mm DAT drive for my archives. Some of my CDRs have bits of silver peeling off them

I say we should go back to vinyl :)

It's been apparent...

[lazrus-armagedn.livejournal.com]

...for quite a while

And I seeem to remember this issue beiing raised before already a good few years ago...I came up with, or discovered, an alternative solution to data storage (some sort of solid-state storage device as I remember it)...but I've forgotten what it was now, dammit!


I do not recommend Traxdata...If they work at all then, in my experience, within two to four months they've ot blotches on them that look like mould!

[teadaemon.livejournal.com]

I've had bad experiences with white-label disks (PC Line from PC World are the worst I've found).

On one occasion I burned a disk with some software updates, went off-site to a classroom on the other side of Birmingham, got around half of the PCs updated, and then started getting repeated read failures. Taking the disk out of the drive, I noticed that the sliver was peeling off, allowing me to look straight through the plastic disk.

[gerald_duck]

Using hard discs is looking like a more and more attractive idea, right now. Including VAT, taken from WoC, SVP and Transtec pricelists:

WD/Seagate hard disc: 120GB for £81 = 67.5p/GB
Verbatim Datalife Plus 80-minute CD-R: 50×700MB for £11.99 = 34p/GB
Verbatim Datelife Plus 80-minutes CD-RW: 700MB for 74p = 106p/GB
JVC DVD-R: 4.7GB for 99p = 21p/GB
JVC DVD-RW: 4.7GB for £2.29 = 49p/GB
DLT cartridge: 10×40GB for £270 = 67.5p/GB

That means I should be backing the company up to hard discs, not DLTs, right? Where's the flaw in my reasoning?

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

There isn't one. I've done exactly that.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

All user-recordable media are likely to suffer from the same problem. I've opted for using HDDs instead.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm... with no disrespect intended to what is, after all, quite a cool-looking hacker machine, I'm not sure our managing director would be happy if I showed him something like that and told him it was the key element of our new backup infrastructure. (-8

Plus, what about offsite backup? We have about 1.5TB, here - that's ten economical, six huge, hard discs per "tape set". We'd have to have some way
of manipulating them all fairly easily. I need to think about this.

Lateral thought: Maybe the cheapest "magazine" for a set of discs is an actual computer? Having your offsite backup being a complete bootable PC with 1000Base-TX would be... amusing.

[teadaemon.livejournal.com]

Hard disks have their own problems, properly managed tape backup is definitely more reliable. Having said that, your solution is undoubtedly sufficient for what you use it for.

I'm currently on the lookout for a DDS4 DAT drive (or possibly a DLT if I can get one cheap enough).

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, some resilience, but not bullet-proof. Good cost to performance/reliability/quantity ratio.