How To Properly Archive Data On Disc Media 120
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, the well-known Free Software Magazine author, goes into great detail on CD/DVD media over at the Ad Terras Per Aspera site. McFarland covers the history of the media, from CDs through recordable DVDs, explaining the various formats and their strengths and drawbacks. The heart of the article is an essay on the DVD-R vs. DVD+R recording standards, leading to McFarland's recommendation for which media he buys for archival storage. Spoiler: it's Taiyo Yuden DVD+R all the way. From the article: 'Unlike pressed CDs/DVDs, burnt CDs/DVDs can eventually fade, due to five things that affect the quality of CD media: sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices (please keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media).'"
Which leads to... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there a point to digitizing human cultural pieces that has survived for 10,000 years onto media that will fail in 10?
Re:Which leads to... (Score:3, Insightful)
That is certainly not true, and even worse digital is less resiliant to errors than analog formats.
Re:Why bother with optical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you'd save a few bucks initially by using optical media. But then you have to split all your data in evenly sized 4.7GB archives or such. Label them all manually. Waste hours swapping hundreds of discs by hand. Catalog all these discs (number them, keep a database or something0. And they take LOTS of physical place to store.
I got tired of looking for a specific DVD. After an hour of flipping thru pages of those (expensive and large) CD wallets and not finding it, I gave in, and bought several TB worth of HD space. Now if I want a movie, it's there, listed alphabetically and all. Jewel cases suck too -- too brittle, wastes space too, and a waste of money.
HDs have a very high density (the new 1TB drives will store more than a spindle of 200 DVDs), requires no storage cases, no constant media swapping, no splitting to fit the size of media, etc. It's all-around better! Restoring stuff is almost instantaneous. You never have to look for a specific disc. Transfer speeds are great. Everything is sorted alphabetically inside folders/directories... What more could you ask for?
Want to make a new copy - to another format, or just onto newer media? It takes what, 15 seconds to start a copy job using HDs? With optical media, you'll be swapping discs by hand for months.
Plus, HDs are not read only -- you can make monthly backups on them no problem (full or differential). Using optical media this is a pain. The cheap discs are write-once, and even if the rewritable discs were cheap, it still takes a while to erase them all manually.
Backup/sync jobs can be totally automated using HDs. Want to do daily differential backups? Schedule it once, never have to bother ever again. With optical discs you'd be swapping, labeling and cataloging media 365 days a year... What a pain.
Long story short, I might as well backup all my storage on 1.44MB floppies instead of optical discs. It'll take hundreds or thousands of them, and you'll spend countless hours swapping media and splitting stuff to fit the media size. NO THANKS!
Re:Why bother with optical? (Score:4, Insightful)
An archive is something that is stored in a safe location for possible use later, but also to save for posterity.
A backup is used to keep current data in two locations in case one set of data is lost.
Hard drives are fine for backups. For archives you want write-once media that can't be easily (or even possibly) erased.
Two different solutions to two different problems.
Re:Reality Check (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, so your time spent burning DVDs is worth nothing eh? Let me give you a call sometime so you can back all my shit up for free.
I have a cron job that executes at 4am that copies everything to a USB external hard disk. I think it took about 30 seconds to write the script.