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Post by hcsunshine90 on Jul 13, 2014 9:51:14 GMT -5
i have two external hard drives, a 1.5TB and a 2.0TB. both are pretty much full with bootlegs of live shows. i've transfered a fraction of the music on these hard drives to about 1,000 CD's so far. (because i always like to have a hard copy of stuff in case the hard drives fail). i've heard that CD's might have a lifetime of about 50 years. someone told me also that he has CD's already that won't play anymore. so, which is likely to happen first, the hard drive failing or a CD's lifetime expiring?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 13, 2014 9:55:04 GMT -5
Just hold some of your older CD's up to a light. You may see little pinholes of light passing through. That has too create some error. This may have been as issue with the early years of CD's.
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Post by Nodscene on Jul 13, 2014 9:58:11 GMT -5
Chances are cd's will last longer if they are burned like they do in commercial applications. With home burned cd's it's a toss up. The problem is, in 50 years are you going to have anything that will be able to read a sata drive. My advice with important data is to make sure it's backe up in 3 locations. If you just need backups then invest in a blu-ray burned as you will get much more data on it. I'd also put all that on an extra hard drive or two and then store those in an anti-static bag. Then every year, do another backup of the data so it's a continuing process. Hard drives are cheap and this way you will always have backup, and it will always follow the technology.
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Post by drtrey3 on Jul 13, 2014 18:07:29 GMT -5
I have two hard discs that I update every month with a copy of my working files. Well, one I update every month, the other disc is with my daughter in college and so I update that less often.
Trey
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DYohn
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Post by DYohn on Jul 13, 2014 22:47:35 GMT -5
CDs are eternal, CDRs are not. I keep all my original commercial CDs in storage: they are my ultimate music system HD backup.  |
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stiehl11
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Post by stiehl11 on Jul 13, 2014 23:15:17 GMT -5
CDs are eternal, CDRs are not. I keep all my original commercial CDs in storage: they are my ultimate music system HD backup. Correct, David. The CD is etched and, pending that there are no surface issues (heavy/deep scratches, delamination) will last forever. CDRs, however, have a dye surpressed between the layers. When a CDR is "burned" the laser makes the "pit" in the dye. That dye is subject to a lot of things (such as sunlight and heat) that will cause it to lose information. I've seen lots of people carry their CDRs in a holder on their sun visor(s). Those CDRs tend not to last too long. |
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Post by yves on Jul 14, 2014 4:27:23 GMT -5
Don't bet on it. Just create (multiple) reliable backups if you cherish your data, and use external harddrives that can be completely unplugged from both the computer and the wall. You don't want to waste your time wading through hundreds of optical discs. To those who disagree, I always reply that you might as well decide to use dozens of crates filled with 3.5" floppy disks. Some say you should always choose a brand that makes the most reliable harddrives, like, for example, Western Digital instead of Seagate. I always reply that you are better off having three copies stored on three Seagates than having only two copies stored on two Western Digitals. (The price of three Seagates is about the same as that of two Western Digitals). That being said, don't use RAID storage as a backup medium because, like I already said, you have to be able to completely unplug the harddrives from both the computer and the wall. If not, your data will still be put at risk. This is due to the fact a backup medium cannot be considered safe until it is stored in a safe place. Even though quite a few modern computer motherboards these days have anti-surge, and, even though high end power supply units these days are also pretty safe, unplugging is still the only way to make the harddrives reliable enough to be considered a backup medium. However, because they are fragile and because they can still completely unexpectedly fail even if they are handled properly, having multiple backup copies is also very important.
P.S., Don't store a backup harddrive for longer periods of time without verifying its integrity once in a while. Also, outweigh the pros and cons of using affordable cloud storage services to create an extra backup copy off-site. (Extra, meaning in addition to your local backups, but not as a replacement for your local backups).
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Post by drtrey3 on Jul 14, 2014 7:27:27 GMT -5
When we got hit by the flood in Nashville 4 years ago, I lost about 20% of my cds after they got dunked. I used my ripped files for backup! The silver discs developed nasty rot that was visible as small to large "holes" between the plastic layers. Some of the discs with the smallest amount of holes were still playable, but you could hear the drive working to correct the literal dropouts.
Trey
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Post by hcsunshine90 on Jul 14, 2014 8:50:04 GMT -5
yes, both of my external hard drives are western digital. now I'm thinking of buying a 4TB (western digital) external hard drive and transferring what I have to that as a backup. I most likely will burn what isn't burned already to CD-R's in case all the external hard drives fail.
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Post by Priapulus on Jul 14, 2014 9:14:46 GMT -5
All hard drives are temporary. But they are so big, and so cheap these days, that you should just buy another for backup. Then buy another to backup the backup...
The three rules of computing are:
1) Backup.
2) Backup.
3) Backup.
Sincerely
/b
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