Exactly so.
However, I have cover-mount CDs off computer mags way back to 1997 and they are all perfectly readable.
I read once that Microsoft has long-term storage in a cave deep underground somewhere with the key data written on to special glass disks. Maybe that's what TNP could take a look at... Alternatively, the moon, once we have a shuttle service twixt our planets.
MM
I get most joy from TDK. The biggest failure rate was with Verbatim, which I won't buy any longer. Maxell have also always been good for me, right back to their floppies. I'll even use cheap supermarket-brand media for interim backups (weeks instead of long-term) and yet none of them has failed so far, anyway.
MM
Yeah, a 1.44MB floppy! Still available from Wilkinsons in the high street. Nice, bright colours which I can stare at for ages without getting bored.
Not sure whether you mean it's insane to copy to a USB stick as well as floppies, or insane not to...?
In any case, these are only for a couple of days or so, then I overwrite 'em anyway! (That's when I start a burn to DVD/CD.)
I have floppy drives in all my PCs. My old Viglen even has a 5¼" as well as the 3½", just in case I need to read a really old floppy. I once used 8" floppies, but sadly never retained any of the drives.
MM
Pretty meaningless. I've had TDK CDs from three different factories, with different dyes, and the quality has varied widely. Yet they were all branded by TDK as exactly the same product.
That's different. They don't depend on a relatively unstable dye, do they?
Not that they are as bad as stated. But I re-check any important ones at regular intervals.
Cor a *big* drive.
I retired a 10MB (megabyte) 1/2 height 5.25" and it's full sized (what 4 x 12") RLL controller card last year. It still worked but rather noisy. Took the covers of to show the kids whats inside a HD, it's still in the lads bedroom somewhere.
The Natural Philosopher wibbled on Thursday 25 March 2010 21:39
Joilet or Rockridge extensions allow for long names.
But, personally I would archive the files (GNU tar or other) and back that up.
MM wibbled on Friday 26 March 2010 07:22
Those are pressed, not burnt and thus should last for a long time (like audio CDs).
I realise you must be a windows user.
Who thinks that spending an hour of his time and £2.50 per night to back a machine up is kewl.
Using a hard disk costs me around 3p per day, and no user time at all, and its all there, uncompressed, instantly available any time I want it.
I always find it amusing when people confuse a conclusion arrived at by painstakingly considering all the options, trying them, costing them and discarding them, as ill found prejudice.
It always tells me something about them .
there you are more complexity, more manual input needed. Especially to restore.
When you find there isn't ROOM on the hard drive to untar the archive to pick the file you have lost, and you have forgotten its name..
whereas now, its just cd /backup/home/me/MY\ Data..and there it all is.
No, the days when one tape in the drive and go home, taking last nights tape out, and with you as security against fire, are gone.
The disks are far larger capacity than the removable media is. And cheaper.
So why not use a disk?
At that time the two kinds of TDK disc's available were plain pink coloured, and plain blue called D-View. The burner was HP brand. For the computer that followed I used Maxwell and like MM havn't had a single problem with them.
Roger R
Factory produced CD/DVDs are different from home recorded ones.
On Mar 26, 7:15=A0am, MM wrote: replaced/superseded, by
You think they use CD-R or DVD-R?
MBQ
This backup method wont work if the computer catches fire or is stolen!
A monthly or weekly backup should be to an external hard disk stored elsewhere.
Or two, > >> >>> Did a little Googling and got a free utility called HDcopy. That copies
Indeed tt was at the time - your average PC came with 20MB, and a top end Compaq Deskpro 386/20e came with 30! (and that was over £6k worth of PC!)
Yup, I have a spare 3.5" mechanism sitting on the shelf for show and tell purposes...
I've not had a computer actually catch fire.
When the computer was stolen, they only took the keyboard and monitor, because an industrial rack mount case didn't seem to appeal to them. Bolted into a rack.. :-)
Oddly enough, they nicked all the CHEAP camera stuff, and left the priceless Nikon lenses and bodies behind. Hard to sell down the pub I suspect.
One conversation I remember down the nick, in a roomful of stolen stuff.
'So how can you prove this stuff is yours'
' because this CD (hauling one up) has only ever been produced in a quantity of 50, by the son of a friend of mine and this (holding up another) is my Symankowski. Not many people have even heard of hiom., let alone own a CD...'
'..and that box was one from work, and I know the person who wrote 'general marketing shit' on the side of it.' :-)
So my data is always held on a POS ten years out of data server of zero interest to thieves. They can take the shiny desktop. If they like Linux.
But yes, I will eventually work out how to cross backup a mates machine and mine, so we hold each others backups. Though I'd better encrypt the emails first. I dont trust anyone that far..
Compressing anything to then use as a backup is generally a bad idea - it doesn't take a lot in the way of errors to render the entire archive useless. At least with uncompressed data there's a chance you can skip over any problems and get most of it back.
cheers
Jules
I've had plenty of ones done on home burners; consumer-grade pressed stuff is a *lot* more robust - it just doesn't seem to have the deterioration issues, seems to do better with scratches / dirt, and I've never known a pressed CD/DVD that a drive won't take.
Kind of. With floppies, the binder can deteriorate over time - I've found that Wabash and Parrot media is particularly prone to this, and the magnetic coating essentially "falls off" as the head wipes across it. But yes, 5.25" disks do generally hold up well over time - I'd trust it more than I would a home-burned CD or DVD.
That's a good thing... but I'd still be concerned about whatever drive was used to write them packing up, and then finding one day that the replacement drive wouldn't read any of them.
(I don't know why that happens - I don't know if the route cause is poor media, poor drives, or even a fundamental issue with the spec so that different manufacturers interpret it slightly differently)
cheers
Jules
The Natural Philosopher wibbled on Friday 26 March 2010 08:51
will list the names in the archive without an unpack. Then you can extract the file required.
Main thing is Rockridge and Joliet will not cope with the *full* range of filenames available to most linux filesystems (basically all characters except / and NULL) nor will they cope with ACLs and XATTRs, which may be important to some people.
I agree - though re disk vs tape
zip files don't have to be compressed. The use case suggested is a convenient way to concatenate multiple files into something with a shorter name.
MBQ
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