I store my recovery files both on site and off site.
Cheaper and sturdier than thumb drives. A thumb
drive can fail. A percentage of your data DVDs will
fail but it's ok if you have recovery files for them so
you can rebuild the damaged sectors.
My first thumbdrive was a 128 MB thumbdrive I got on sale from Lexar and it worked about two years and I think the chip became unseated but I backed it up when it started showing problems. Other than that, I've been completely happy with my thumbdrives. I've had one sit in the hot sun by accident and one or two others went through the washer twice and the dryer once. They still work. I use a a backup drive for my other stuff and I have a backup drive from our computer that was hit by a virus which I haven't seen the need to erase and start over.
We have a wedding video on DVD and it has a wobble in both DVD players so I don't trust DVDs. Our other copy is on VHS and works.
I trust solid state over optical because there is a laser that burns the CD and I read there is photosensitive dye on the CD so sunlight can cause errors.
My other problem was that writing to a CD needs a steady stream of data and my older CD writer wouldn't keep up with writing a full disk so there were limits to what I could put on a CD. I tried slowing down the number of times the CD spun which meant that it was slowed down to 1X write speed and I still couldn't get a full CD.
After trying backups on floppies, tape media, CDs, and DVDs; I've generally abandoned all of them in favor of a duplicate hard disk. I did use a USB thumbdrive for my EEEpc as it only required 4Gbytes to store a complete image. But the truth is that hard disks are so cheap these days that the other alternatives are rather obsolete. I have had lots of disappointments when I went to restore from these removable media. And like all of us, I don't like being disappointed.
If one can send these rather large files to offsite storage as well, that is an added benefit as a safety net. But, the images are rather large and slow to send. It is best to break the image up into a size similar to a conventional CD, say 700MB and transmit in pieces with CRC check of some sort.
I enjoy documentaries from the BBC. I used to worry over them
because I would write them to a DVD and a few of my older favorites
somehow became unreadable. Now I don't worry about them at all.
I usually download these BBC documentaries as rar sets from usenet.
Since the VLC video player can play a video contained in a rar archive
set directly without any need to extract the rar archive to its original video file
I just store the rars onto DVD for storage. Since the binary files remain on
the usenet servers indefinitely now (3 years back and growing) and since
recover par files are always included with the posts, if your DVD gets damaged
all you have to do is retrieve however many par recovery blocks you
need to rebuild the rar archive. If you unpack the archive and then delete the
rars you cannot later get the pars and rebuild...so I always keep the rar sets.
After trying backups on floppies, tape media, CDs, and DVDs; I've generally abandoned all of them in favor of a duplicate hard disk.
I've also switched to hard drives for most of my backups. I'm pushing about 2 TB of photos right now (not including video) and it's difficult to back them up any other way. Currently, I've got 4 copies (including the drives in my PC) so I can rotate them as they get updated to off-site storage.
I typically have another 16-32 GB of photo files every week (I'm not very good at culling ) so even just burning a week's worth of data to DVD is tedious (especially making multiple copies). I do use DVDs for project backups and things other than photos/video.
I have some VHS video tapes from ~1985 that were converted to DVD ~1999. The DVDs have degraded more than the VHS tapes have! I'm sure it must be poor quality DVD disks, but that's ridiculous!
I thought DVD and CD's was supposed to last longer then they do.
This picture was put on a CD in 2004, it was clear, now it looks Photo Shopped...
Notice the shadow around the bench, I know jpg is "lossy", but that is a bit much..
If they can put an 8 track into space and have it still working this many years later,
why can't "they" make better data storage here on earth?....(i don't know who "they" are, but I wish they would hurry.)
Thanks Holly, we were trying for "Tacky"... I think we got it...
That is just one corner of "the hole in the ground trying to fill it self up". it is a fun hobby,
Did you know Koi fish will follow you around the pond, just like a pet dog, it's true...
The big red box in the background, is an excellent power source for many water propelled experiments.
And I was joking about the CD, sorry about that, sometimes I am not as funny as I think I am...
Actually some image viewers will try to display a jpg
even if there is funky corrupted data inside it...I thought maybe that
was what you meant. usually the demarcation line where
the funky data starts is very obvious though.
Do those fish seriously follow you?? That's just amazing.
I was in the Florida Keys once and there were 2 dolphins that would
swim along side as you walked out on this long dock. When you would
stop they would stick their heads up and make funny sounds at you
that were sort of like they were trying to laugh.
I didn't read this entire thread yet, but My sister was searching for "GED Online" (without quotes) and within the first few links, I got a browser hijack attempt. I managed to hit alt+f4 and killed the process before it completed, but... I just noticed I have a security update through "Automatic Updates" (WinXP SP3) with 17 updates.
Is this a result of a undetected virus, or is it an actual update? I am not installing anything further till I figure out if Automatic Update is actualy from MS or if it is part of the virus. Anyone have any clues?
My last automatically downloaded update to WinXP SP3 (a .NET update, in fact) killed Windows dead. I had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. So no more Windows updates for me. Your results may vary.
That looks like a backyard motif that my company installed at Dolly Parton's house last year. (We we told to not take pictures otherwise I would share).
I thought DVD and CD's was supposed to last longer then they do.
This picture was put on a CD in 2004, it was clear, now it looks Photo Shopped...
Notice the shadow around the bench, I know jpg is "lossy", but that is a bit much..
If they can put an 8 track into space and have it still working this many years later,
why can't "they" make better data storage here on earth?....(i don't know who "they" are, but I wish they would hurry.)
I have two computers that run Windows and are set to auto update. One is Windows 7 the other is XP, neither have gotten any updates today, which is odd because it is Patch Tuesday. Maybe they haven/t started yet.
I never use the automatic part of auto update, I just use it as an alert and download updates directly from the MS update site. looks like a bunch of software is updating, Apple iTunes, MS, Adobe Reader.
All the post dates for the patches/updates are for today that I noticed.
There is one great advantage to using M$ Windows for your OS. It is quite easy to tell the IRS that the computer failed, backups didn't work, and you lost all your tax records.
I've given up on XP auto-updates as the perception I have is they are not being well supported by M$. But I still have auto-updates for Vista and Windows 7 on those rare occasions that I actually log on in those OSes.
I use auto-updates on my Windows machines. So far no problems and I did see some updates pushed yesterday. I've been in the Windows stinks camp, but Windows 7 actually impresses me. Granted it is bloated, but you can set up non-administrator accounts that can escalate their privileges to administrator on demand. This makes the machine much more malware resistant. I know Linux had this years ago, but it's good to see it on Windows.
I also use Ubuntu Linux and they push updates often as well. In the past five years I've only had one of them render a machine unusable. It was the usual suspect xorg.conf and I spent the longest time sorting through that problem.
I have Windows 7 on my Toshiba NB-250, which is now a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux netbook version 10.xx. It seems to be behaving itself.
Regarding bloat, I knew I didn't want to use the Windows 7 much - so I removed all the Norton Security, all the M$ game promotions, and all the M$ Office introductory offers. Then I installed Open Office and Avasta AV (which is free.) This reduced the size of the active M$ software by about 40%. There is certainly a great deal of bloat. I haven't include the 40-50GByte hidden partition on my 250GByte drive that is just sitting there with an original image of W7 just in case the whole OS goes down. So, M$ W7 remains a hard disk pig because of touting itself and commercial partners and it requires a recovery option that dominates the hard disk.
Yeah, Windows 7 is pretty good......... for now. M$ has a way of vastly improving their product after a big flop - like Vista. But it is still way too expensive to get both Chinese and English input in the OS. Linux provides multiple languages for free.
Dual boot has for myself become the only way to live with M$. If and when one gets a major Linux failure of some sort (bad update or lightning strike), it is much easier to install a complete new updated image of the software (after all it is free) than it is to wade in and try and repair a bad update. IF all your personal data is on a separate partition, it isn't at risk of loss.
Comments
My first thumbdrive was a 128 MB thumbdrive I got on sale from Lexar and it worked about two years and I think the chip became unseated but I backed it up when it started showing problems. Other than that, I've been completely happy with my thumbdrives. I've had one sit in the hot sun by accident and one or two others went through the washer twice and the dryer once. They still work. I use a a backup drive for my other stuff and I have a backup drive from our computer that was hit by a virus which I haven't seen the need to erase and start over.
We have a wedding video on DVD and it has a wobble in both DVD players so I don't trust DVDs. Our other copy is on VHS and works.
I trust solid state over optical because there is a laser that burns the CD and I read there is photosensitive dye on the CD so sunlight can cause errors.
My other problem was that writing to a CD needs a steady stream of data and my older CD writer wouldn't keep up with writing a full disk so there were limits to what I could put on a CD. I tried slowing down the number of times the CD spun which meant that it was slowed down to 1X write speed and I still couldn't get a full CD.
If one can send these rather large files to offsite storage as well, that is an added benefit as a safety net. But, the images are rather large and slow to send. It is best to break the image up into a size similar to a conventional CD, say 700MB and transmit in pieces with CRC check of some sort.
because I would write them to a DVD and a few of my older favorites
somehow became unreadable. Now I don't worry about them at all.
I usually download these BBC documentaries as rar sets from usenet.
Since the VLC video player can play a video contained in a rar archive
set directly without any need to extract the rar archive to its original video file
I just store the rars onto DVD for storage. Since the binary files remain on
the usenet servers indefinitely now (3 years back and growing) and since
recover par files are always included with the posts, if your DVD gets damaged
all you have to do is retrieve however many par recovery blocks you
need to rebuild the rar archive. If you unpack the archive and then delete the
rars you cannot later get the pars and rebuild...so I always keep the rar sets.
I've also switched to hard drives for most of my backups. I'm pushing about 2 TB of photos right now (not including video) and it's difficult to back them up any other way. Currently, I've got 4 copies (including the drives in my PC) so I can rotate them as they get updated to off-site storage.
I typically have another 16-32 GB of photo files every week (I'm not very good at culling
-Phil
This picture was put on a CD in 2004, it was clear, now it looks Photo Shopped...
Notice the shadow around the bench, I know jpg is "lossy", but that is a bit much..
If they can put an 8 track into space and have it still working this many years later,
why can't "they" make better data storage here on earth?....(i don't know who "they" are, but I wish they would hurry.)
If you can still read the data then I'd say that's exactly the same as the image looked
back when the cd was created..
That scene has a kind of Alice in wonderland/Munchkinland thing going on :-)
That's a busy looking back yard there...
That is just one corner of "the hole in the ground trying to fill it self up". it is a fun hobby,
Did you know Koi fish will follow you around the pond, just like a pet dog, it's true...
The big red box in the background, is an excellent power source for many water propelled experiments.
And I was joking about the CD, sorry about that, sometimes I am not as funny as I think I am...
-Tommy
even if there is funky corrupted data inside it...I thought maybe that
was what you meant. usually the demarcation line where
the funky data starts is very obvious though.
Do those fish seriously follow you?? That's just amazing.
I was in the Florida Keys once and there were 2 dolphins that would
swim along side as you walked out on this long dock. When you would
stop they would stick their heads up and make funny sounds at you
that were sort of like they were trying to laugh.
Is this a result of a undetected virus, or is it an actual update? I am not installing anything further till I figure out if Automatic Update is actualy from MS or if it is part of the virus. Anyone have any clues?
These fish will not let you do either...
in fact they like to come at you straight on, and turn away at the last second...
And here is the camera platform used for the underwater shots...
Yup that's me, on Hawaiian time...
And to rerail this thread,
You should allways back up all your data, and never clik a link you dont trust...
-Tommy
My last automatically downloaded update to WinXP SP3 (a .NET update, in fact) killed Windows dead. I had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. So no more Windows updates for me. Your results may vary.
-Phil
That looks like a backyard motif that my company installed at Dolly Parton's house last year. (We we told to not take pictures otherwise I would share).
Not to be confused with Dolly Parts-On
All the post dates for the patches/updates are for today that I noticed.
I've given up on XP auto-updates as the perception I have is they are not being well supported by M$. But I still have auto-updates for Vista and Windows 7 on those rare occasions that I actually log on in those OSes.
I also use Ubuntu Linux and they push updates often as well. In the past five years I've only had one of them render a machine unusable. It was the usual suspect xorg.conf and I spent the longest time sorting through that problem.
Regarding bloat, I knew I didn't want to use the Windows 7 much - so I removed all the Norton Security, all the M$ game promotions, and all the M$ Office introductory offers. Then I installed Open Office and Avasta AV (which is free.) This reduced the size of the active M$ software by about 40%. There is certainly a great deal of bloat. I haven't include the 40-50GByte hidden partition on my 250GByte drive that is just sitting there with an original image of W7 just in case the whole OS goes down. So, M$ W7 remains a hard disk pig because of touting itself and commercial partners and it requires a recovery option that dominates the hard disk.
Yeah, Windows 7 is pretty good......... for now. M$ has a way of vastly improving their product after a big flop - like Vista. But it is still way too expensive to get both Chinese and English input in the OS. Linux provides multiple languages for free.
Dual boot has for myself become the only way to live with M$. If and when one gets a major Linux failure of some sort (bad update or lightning strike), it is much easier to install a complete new updated image of the software (after all it is free) than it is to wade in and try and repair a bad update. IF all your personal data is on a separate partition, it isn't at risk of loss.