OT The Cloud

[Ron]

How are HDD more reliable then DVDs? Especially if you make several copies?

[krw]

DVDs suck. They age and there is no telling when you're going to get an error creep in. They really aren't designed for data.

[George]

I am not really interested in storing my information on someone elses system even though the marketing department has decided to call it "the cloud".

External hard drives are inexpensive. I have two drives that I rotate and store properly. Automatic backup software does the rest and I retain control of my data.

[HeyBub]

True. The downside is that USB drives are pitifully slow compared to an internal drive, 480Mbps vs. 6Gbps. An internal SATA drive has roughly twelve times the transfer rate of a USB drive.

[aemeijers]

Agreed, but not that big a deal for doing backups, since you can light it up and walk away. (Unless of course you are doing manual backups.)

[TSA Supervisor]

I've also wondered that. I've got some CD going back a few years. I should check them, for fun.

[krw]

I have two USB drives. I back up my laptop to one weekly, then copy that to the other when I get around to it (probably every three months).

The difference is not that great. The sustained transfer rate to the drive is nowhere near 6Gbps (more like 1Gbps for the fastest drives on the market).

In any case, it's several orders of magnitude faster than DVD.

[krw]

innews:ItqdnWGD2895mS_QnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

You won't notice sparse errors on music CDs.

[Higgs Boson]

Here's what Amazon shows for these "archival" DVDs that they claim will last 100 years.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Verbatim 95355 UltraLife 4.7 GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R, 50-Disc Spindle by Verbatim

3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews) | Like (0) List Price: $160.00 Price: $72.28 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details You Save: $87.72 (55%) 24 new from $72.28 Size: 50-Disc 5-Disc 50-Disc =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

I'm leaning toward trying these rather than get another external HD. (I won't be around in 100 years to call them a liar if it doesn't work )

Only thing I'm not sure about is the transfer rate. Some posts on here mentioned very slow transfer rate? Excuse dumb question, but is that when transferring from the computer to the DVD?

Also, what is the rate when transferring back from DVD to computer (assuming there's a reason to do that).

Also: Why DVD when data only requires HD? I can see DVD for photos, etc, but otherwise?

HB

[Higgs Boson]

I guess you saw where IPod and the other one are tracking your every move and sending the info back so that the mfgr can track where they should plan for density?

It's here! 1984 has come but not gone.

I'm still using a cheapo cell phone with a cheapo $20/quarter pmt. Don't need all that fancy stuff.

HB

[willshak]

Metspitzer wrote the following:

Buy an external HD that is connected to your computer vis USB. You can get them in many capacities cheaply. Seagate has a 500 Gigabyte external HD for $60. Put all your valuable stuff on there for storage. Pull the USB plug until you need to store or retrieve your data. Storing your data on some server that can access your data is not very secure.

[Jim Yanik]

"Ralph Mowery" wrote in news:NK2dnaH4ZMYnhi_QnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

were you checking DVDs or CDs?

I didn't look at my CDs for a couple of years,then found they were unreadable;some files would read,others would not.Maybe I used cheapo CDs.

I've read of other people having the same problem with home-burned CDs. (not stamped-out CDs.)

[Ralph Mowery]

They were CDs. When they were made, I don't think you could get a DVD burner for a computer back in 99, but may be mistaken. Computers advance way too fast to keep up with.

[aemeijers]

at

> they claim 100 years for this brand and style.

I'll throw in- it isn't just the quality of the blank media, it is the quality of the drive. Not as much of a problem as it used to be, but sometimes you still get disks that will read fine on the drive they were burned on, but not on a different drive. Hint- pay the extra 5-10 bucks and get a drive that actually has a brand name on it. It makes a difference.

[The Daring Dufas]

I just thought of an interesting problem the government has been running into with data storage media. The equipment isn't around anymore to read the old tapes. They're having to hunt down retired IBM, UNIVAC, DEC, etc engineers to help them get the information off those old data tapes. I wonder if someone or some international group can come up with a standard archival media that will stay in use for a century or more? Oh yea, and a standard digital format to go along with it.

TDD

[mike]

The Daring Dufas wrote: snip

We all have that problem. I had to copy my VIC20 cassette tapes to floppy, then to high density floppy, then to zip disks, then to cd, then to dvd. For many of us, the amount of data is small enough that we can copy it to new technology before the old wears out. And it's much easier to keep all the old stuff than to try to sort it.

But I still have all 80GB of stuff on the primary hard drive. It's quicker to search the whole thing for a driver than to try to figger out which DVD it's on.

[aemeijers]

On 4/24/2011 1:18 AM, The Daring Dufas wrote: (snip)

Yes, it has been a problem at times. There are data retrieval companies out there that maintain libraries of obsolete hardware and software just for such occasions. And there are standards, so resurrecting engineers is seldom needed (assuming you can figure out which standard was used.) But if you go to data backup school, the first class describes the principles of how to avoid that. You have to constantly maintain your backups, testing them, refreshing them, and moving them to new media as required. As you might imagine, in a budget crunch, that is often pushed back to 'later', And since nobody can afford to back up everything forever, you have to decide how long data needs to be kept, and which data to spend the money on. Choose wisely, lest Murphy rise up and bite your posterior.

I don't recall the specifics offhand, but there are indeed efforts to come up with a universal standard for modern fancy documents, one that doesn't care what media it is stored on. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is driving that train, IIRC, and I'm sure Library of Congress has a seat at the table. Older data is less of an issue, since ASCII and such are well documented and accepted. The pile is so huge that standards for the meta-data for each chunk of data, are just as important as the data set itself. Imagine having 100 unlabeled CDs, and trying to find something on them. Now imagine a data pile the size of a million CDs, without an index.

Of course, for really important stuff, no electronic media yet beats hardcopy, printed or etched on something that won't turn to dust in 20 years, and stored in a controlled environment.

[George]

The government would simply need to do a little planning...

It has been well known for a long time that if you want to preserve data you need to move it to different media as time goes on. In the case of some media you need to rewrite the data to insure it doesn't degrade along the way.

[David Nebenzahl]

On 4/24/2011 4:34 AM aemeijers spake thus:

How in the world could the format of a document have *anything* to do with the medium it's stored on?

The only possible case I can think of would be an old database or other indexed document stored using ISAM or some other obsolete storage method on an IBM mainframe.

I've worked in the media conversion business, so I know something whereof I speak.

There are (more or less) universal standards available today. Let's look at them:

o ASCII: the simplest form of text storage possible. Hasn't changed much since Day One. Even 7-bit ASCII documents could easily be read by most computer systems in use today.

o PDF: a de facto standard. Few computers in use today that can't read this format. (Of course, it suffers from some defects, owing to its semi-proprietary status as a creation of Adobe, but despite this it pretty much lives up to its claim of being a "portable document format".)

o RTF: although too closely associated with Microsoft Word, this is in fact a very widely-accepted and understood document format. Certainly any working copy of Word (or Open Office) will accept a RTF doc.

There is certainly a humungous pile of document formats, most of them moldering on the dustheap of history. I used to work for a company that specialized in oddball data format conversion software, and just off the top of my head, there is:

o Wang (word processing systems) o DEC (proprietary formats) o Lanier (word processing) o EBCDIC o Halo CUT (graphic images) o GEM (old Ventura Publisher) o PICT o Word Perfect (still in use, I guess, at least by lawyers) o WordStar o Lotus 1-2-3

(I mixed in some graphic formats there just for fun)

Yes. The value of printed documentation is highly underrated.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Surely there was a non-proprietary RTF format long before M$ came up with their not-completely-compatible format by the same name, wasn't there?

Perce