I've been on far too many occasions disappointed to find a CD or DVD backup I'd burned a while back unreadable by my optical drive. I seem to recall somebody saying how CD's were indestructable... well, lemme tell ya, you don't just have to put them in the microwave render them useless (though the microwave method is the most fun).
What I've resorted to now is burning two identical copies of my DVD or CD backup. This way, if one file is rendered unreadable by a scratch, I have one more chance to retrieve it, using the other DVD. Optical media is so ridiculously cheap now that I don't mind this so much (it's the difference between a quarter and fifty cents, after all), and DVD burners are getting fast enough that doubling the burning time isn't a huge hassle either.
And now, I get the piece of mind that my backups remain useful in the years to come (unless both discs get scratched...)
Do you implement redundancy into your backups to ensure security? Leave a comment below!
Monday, February 4, 2008
Worried about unreadable CD's/DVD's? Burn two copies!
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2 comments:
What do you do if you've been collecting CD's & DVD's for years and you have over 1200 cd's and Dvd's of data? Is it affordable to make 2 copies of each?
If you're really interested in making duplicates of all of that, you can potentially buy that many blanks at a reasonable bulk price, and I'd just keep them in well-labeled spindles and kept in the closet. I'd say I only have about two to 300 discs in my collection, and since I only started making duplicates recently, only about 30 of them have duplicates.
If you take care of your discs, duplicates aren't a necessity, but if you're worried about redundancy, it's not a bad system. There's something in me that's more comfortable keeping data in optical drives as opposed to hard drives that can go down and be inexpensive or impossible to recover.
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