DVD Photo BackUp

[Gorden]

Don't rely only on a dvd back up as I'm trying to copy some photos from dvd's I burnt in 2004/05 and they are very hard to read now.

GW

[Falcon]

WHAT ??

[DekelzMan]

Yeah I've experienced that too. It really depends on the quality of the dvd you burn to. I have some that are 10 years old and are just fine and some that are 3 years old and they're unreadable...With the cost of external hard drives so low these days ( Under a $100 for a terabyte!) I have given up dvds entirely. Just fill up a drive and park it on a shelf.

[Gorden]

Yeah I've experienced that too. It really depends on the quality of the dvd you burn to. I have some that are 10 years old and are just fine and some that are 3 years old and they're unreadable...With the cost of external hard drives so low these days ( Under a $100 for a terabyte!) I have given up dvds entirely. Just fill up a drive and park it on a shelf.

I'm doing that right now I have about 50DVD full of photos..then out to buy a drive HD

[Tom]

Hard drives aren't great for archiving long term either.

They need to be spun up periodically, and hard drives are known to fail.  They're way more reliable than they used to be though, and are probably a better solution than writable optical disks.

The best way to archive is to keep it in active storage that is backed up, not on a shelf.  Even tapes, one of the best ways to archive, end up sticking to themselves and failing destructively after a few years.

[Shawn68z]

Gord have you considered one of those On-Line backup services?  You download an app from them, which compresses,and encrypts your data before uploading to their harddrives. They have RAID systems, with offsite tape back ups.    When I worked for a small furniture company in ontario we used a service their for all our financial databases.   It was only a few dollars a month.

Shawn

[weekend camper]

If the data is very special, always have a back up of the back up.




On a side note, when I used to have two/three burners in my PC, I'd notice that some disks would only work in one of the drives, likely the original burner.  Not sure if that has changed in the past 6 years, but something to explore.

[RC51]

Because I own my business and have similar but different considerations, I use pretty much everything except a disk to back up services. The best form for me has been to use an online service like Shawn suggested which syncs with my main system which is also synched with two of my laptops. My main system is backed up to another HD hourly and all of this is managed automatically. If one system fails (and it has happened a few times), I still have multiple sources of redundant backups. Another thing I do is use a hosted exchange server which allows all of my .pst data files (etcetera) to be used across different machines, PDAs and multiple subcontractors. The online backup I use runs just over $100 per year for the basic 20GB storage and you can add more. I'm not a pack rat so I don't keep everything and can keep the file size manageable. The exchange server for 5 accounts and a share-point site is $500 per year and it has been a major saving grace. Exchange servers aside, the online cloud-based systems have been awesome and flawless for me personally. Highly recommend it.

P.