*not* backing up to DVD

[Rich Braun]

Edward Ned Harvey <blu-Z8efaSeK1ezqlBn2x/YWAg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> My first comment is going to be:  Don't backup to DVD.
> ...
> 6 months later, generally, 50% of the disks are bad.  They simply degrade
> over time.  People think they're permanent, but that's only true with
> factory made, silver shiny CD's.  Not true for burned disks.

Ditto.  Don't trust this medium.  Maybe there are better ones out there, but
generally what I've found is that the retail discs (CDs and DVDs) are made
with a single layer of vinyl facing down toward the optical pickup, then a
layer of aluminum, then a layer of paint with the label.  The label doesn't
protect against oxidation well enough, and it also provides no protection
against mechanical rubbing:  your data is immensely fragile.

Five years ago I made an archive of about 250 DVDs from my old VHS and miniDV
camcorder tapes, two copies of each.  This past year I copied all those to a
file server.  There were about a dozen bad discs that couldn't be copied, and
I found that both copies of one or two of the items in my collection were
unreadable.

These days I have a different archival mechanism:  I bought a cheapo ($400)
12-slot hot-swap RAID chassis and a pile of 750GB disk drives (about $90
apiece).  Yes it's kind of expensive but not more than the price of tape or an
equivalent amount of DVD media.  I now have a minimum of 3 copies of
everything:  the running filesystem, an on-site copy and an off-site copy --
all on standard 3-1/2" SATA disk cartridges.

-rich