I don't still *use* them - I just have loads from when I did use them! I have copied a number on to hard drive, just to make sure. However, all the floppies I wanted to copy from worked. Quick C, QuickBASIC, MASM, and lots more.
MM
Not as far as I am concerned.
They are not stable with time., they cant accept a standard files system or extended file names, they are not rewritable. And they are because of that expensive.
And they have insufficient capacity.
But don't mind me, you back your stiff up on em.
Just don't come crying to me when it gets corrupted and you cant read it.
Cripes! MASM!
I remember that..
I've still gt a copy of leisure suit Larry on Floppies somewhere.
Well, you did say you still use them - "whack them onto a floppy AND a USB stick". But if that's not true, then you're not as insane as I'd worried :-)
I might still have a working floppy drive somewhere. My wife's laptop has no CD drive either in normal use. I just can't be bothered with libraries of little disks.
When I first started burning CDRs about 10/12 years ago I found some that became unreadable after a couple of years storage (one in a matter of months.) Ones I've written in the last, say, 7/8 years I've not had a problem with and still work ok.
I vaguely recall reading about how they took a while to get the cheap substrate for mass produced CDRs right after the original gold(?) layer they used.
It's funny though. I went from using CDs as a backup medium to HDDs because of the apparent increased reliablity but in the last few years I've had many drives of various makes die in short order with only moderate uptime and use.
check
What's not standard about ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167?
Ever heard of a DVD-RW?
Andy
Sounds good - make sure you test it at some point *before* disk failure though. The amount of users who never test backups....
Darren
No idea. would only acccept DOS style filenames last time I tried burning one.
Yup. But they dont have unlimited life, do they? No better than a flash drive, and anything that can be erqased, will be erased..Murphys law.
the killer was that it was a manual operation involving many disks to fully back up. And I dont want tio have to sort through teh disks to work out which one needs tahte backup..etc.
Now, a cron scripts does it all every night.
Ive got 27 gigs of data that I need to preserve. That's 5-6 DVDS. Its very hard to split it up.
Backing that lot up every night, with an expected lifetime on the disks of no more than 3 years, (1000 erase operations) is FAR worse than most hard drives.
And would take a couple of hours a day.
Plus there is an uncertainty as to whether at any given time., the media is actually readable. with an online disk drive, if its not giving errors, its 99% certain that it is, and you can in nay case check it whenever you want.
Now these may not be valid reasons for you, but they were for me.
Every morning i get an email message telling me what's been freshly backed up that night, and if it aint the files I've been working on, I have a reason to check. And, if as happened last week after a power failure, I don't get an email at all, I KNOW I have a serious problem, which I did.
And a further unexpected bonus, is that if I have an 'oops' moment and trash a file, or directory, I have the backup online and ready to restore.and we all have 'oops' moments.
The key thing for me is I wanted full nightly automatic backups with as little manual intervention as possible.
The best cost benefit was a second drive and rsync. Better would have been a separate machine, tucked away where it would not bget stolen.
Best would be a separate machine somewhere else, where it would survive a house fire.
I could have RAIDED teh disks, but I have had bad experiences with RAID. As I said ina previous post, IF uyou have a disk array that is alwauys active, and you get a situation like a power failure, you have a very good chance of trashing two disks, not just one. By having a disk mainly inactive, that doesn't happen.
And the backup mechanism is readily portable to a remote machine, which In time I will do.
That's exactly the situation I have.
When the HD began to show signs of imminent failure I backed everything up onto CD, making sure there was more than one copy of each CD. Now I can't read any of them. They were TDK brand if that means anything. They don't look deteriorated in any way and have been stored on a shelf in plastic cases out of strong light.
I tried fitting the original optical drive, in a current machine, but no joy. I still have some hope that something will turn up that enables them to be read...by which time their contents will be history anyway.
Roger R
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
You have mail ...
In message , geoff writes
Or not
Already have done. Works fine. Didn't need the boot disc either - just unplugged the original Drive C, and it booted.
Not. ;-) You need to look at the sig for the spam trap.
I use EMC Retrospect. Once it runs out of space, it starts to groom the oldest versions to gain more space. You can also schedule it to makes copies of sets etc.
Easy enough with windows - Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, Maxblast (with the non seagate magic keypress!), or any number of freeware equivalents. The ultimate boot CD has quite a few as well.
If you want to swap boot drives without taking one out and actually swapping, you can just created a duplicate line in boot.ini that loads windows from the other drive. That way you get a boot menu at startup and choice of which partition to boot. As the copy will have the same menu, you can use the bios to force a boot from the backup drive and it will still work without any juggling.
Given the price of DVD+/-Rs its hardly worth using the rewriteables. They are slower to write and more expensive.
I would not use DVD as my only backup mechanism, but don't have a problem using them for weekly snapshots or other intermediate second level snapshots.
Pull out another batch of blank disks and write em... chuck in backup DVD containers on rotation etc.
I can write a full DVD in under 10 mins. With a couple of drives going that would be half an hour tops to do 30 gig.
Another reason for not use RWs. If one R fails, you have the one from the week before etc.
Indeed - its hard to beat disc for daily backup and intermediate length storage. Its a good plan to have something else to fall back on though. (e.g. if someone pinches the computer and the NAS)
Perhaps there is a market for a NAS you can bury in the garden!
I suppose internet based storage is a viable option these days for long term snapshots.
I can't think of a brand of drive I have never had a failure with, and also I can't think of one that I have not also had long faultless service from. All the makers have had lemons at times, that is for sure.
These days I tend to by whatever has a reasonable spec and price point and not worry too much about the brand.
(I think the first hard drive I bought (a 42MB seagate 5.25" half height
- with controller card for my Amiga 2000 at a total cost of about £450!) was still going strong after several years - it got replaced with a
170MB connor SCSI drive and retired to an old PC where it did another few years, before eventually being retired as too small to be of any use. Still worked fine though!)
Zip the files, then! And then burn the zip.
25 pence per disk? I don't think so!4.7 gb? For 25 pence? What, you can't eat TWO?!!
...sounds a bit rude - but I know what you mean!
Boo-hoo! I'm crying already. No, I'm not! You're getting carried away by your aversion to DVDs.
MM
I've just popped in a recent CD-ROM. Here are some filenames:
"Endian rtns removed from No Skin KTN GenProcs.txt" "KnowTheNotes_Conv_Routines.bas" "KnowTheNotes_EditEventData.frm" "KnowTheNotes_Keyboard_RestrictResize.bas" "KTN_Screenshot for QuickHelpSheetSmall.jpg"
and so on.
Who's talking about unlimited? 10 years is more than enough for me, since the app will be completely obsolete, and replaced/superseded, by then anyway. You reckon CDs/DVDs are all gonna die within 10 years? What about the billions of movie DVDs that have been issued over the past few years? Are they all going to become unreadable?
Well, if you have SO MUCH to backup, you could consider doing a differential backup, I suppose. I just don't think you are addressing the backup task effectively. How come you need 10 DVDs for goodness' sake? The vast majority of my hard drive is operating system, i.e. stuff that I can reinstall if the worst happened. My data represents a miniscule portion of the contents. Why do I, why do YOU, need to back up Windows/Linux system files? It's pointless.
If you used True Image files (.tib) you can load these as disks and you can read the files straight off the backup media. You can treat the image as if it were a read-only hard drive.
Ah, you're using RW, which are slow. Even if you did have to use 6 write-once 6 DVDs, that's only £1.50 per day. If your data is so valuable to you, why quibble over such a paltry sum? Now, if your data is e.g. customer data (that's a heck of a lot of customers in 27gb!) are you backing up the same data over an over again? For instance, "14 Acacia Drive" instead of the much shorter postcode? Maybe you need to restructure your problem?
There's no way any optimised design would need to backup the whole
27gb EVERY day, unless we're talking about a major financial institution that ain't going to be faffing about with PCs anyway. Those 25 million records lost by HMRC a year or two back, even they only comprised 2 DVDs.So what backup media do you depend upon then? A hard drive? (!!!!)
Oh, so not the whole 27gb, then!
You have that amount of data and you permit *power failures*?!! One system I wrote, the company purchased its own petrol generator to drive the one PC that did the backups and it kicked in automatically in the event of a power outage. That's how seriously they treated their data. Me, well, I get power failures here and I have a UPS. Cost
60 quid.Indeed. But I just reach for my recent backup CD or DVD and bingo! Takes me about 30 seconds.
Phew, I think you really need to re-visit the data and see what actually needs to be backed up. I reckon you must be backing up the same "data" night after night when it isn't necessary, e.g. system files.
MM
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