[darcybaston]

Hey folks. I keep hearing horror stories about CDR/DVDR type media losing its data within months to years, and have lost some data myself from disks that seemed to have its data evaporate. Well, when I say evaporate I mean within months, files that could open one month were unreadable in the next etc.

Someone told me that the organic nature of DVD/CD R media interracts very easily with the air and the foam in the soft sleeve multipak media holders. You know the kind that look like binders with pages of pockets? I'm not sure if this is true, but the all this information and experience has led me to believe that if I really want to archive something for 5-10 years, optical is not the way go.

I've considered using hard drives, but even those devices are on borrowed time. I've had a good track record, getting a hard drive to last at least 5 years, but I've had a couple die on me in that time period too.

So, my next bit of research is going to be on other solutions including tape. While looking up stuff, I discovered Iomega had a cartridge solution called the Iomega Rev. I know it's an independent motor hard drive cartridge solution, but they claim their media will hold information for 30 years. I'm assuming that's in a vacuum, but surely in a dry cool environment I can get 10 years out of it.

Are there any other solutions I should/could be looking at? Does anyone have any personal experience with the goal of long-term data storage? Are my concerns about hard drives and optical storage exagerated?

[Clive]

Personally, barring the problems you are seeing with DVD data disappearing, the safest bet seems to me to be DVDs. The main reason for this is that in 10-15 years time you are still going to be able to *buy* a drive that will read this data (even if it cannot write it). You can’t say the same about any other media, and I really doubt you can get anything that Iomega to run for that period of time.

Perhaps you should look into the media you are buying and/or the repair state of your current disk burner?

[darcybaston]

Thanks Clive.

The data loss rate is low for the DVDs, true.

I've lost data on DVDs using various computers. I've yet to lose any data with the 3/4 year old G5's drive.

[Clive]

Well, it kind of points towards your drives being a problem, or perhaps the media? Are you manually backing up or using something like Retrospect?

I've had problems with DAT drives in the past, where you get a whole batch of bad tapes - it's not until you try to restore something that it becomes apparent. With a decent back-up application at least it can verify after its finished writing, so that you can be that bit surer of your back-up.

If you're only losing a little data from the disks, perhaps you need a bit more rigourous back-up strategy, like everything gets backed up at least three times?

The nice thing about DVD is obviously that the media and the drives are cheap, and they are going to be around for years to come. As I’ve hinted, I wouldn’t trust anything that Iomega makes. Anyone got a working Zip drive!? :-)

[darcybaston]

I use Toast and don't keep media that fails verification.

I may just switch to dual-layer to save on having to manage so many discs. I just find it annoying to have 40 dvds when I could have 3 of those Rev cartridges. I do have to plan on the availability of devices to read whatever media I choose 10 years from now, and DVD readers will probably be around for longer than Iomega devices.

[Clive]

Ok, well, I'd recommend that you invest in a copy of Retrospect too. The real benefit being that it can keep all versions of work in progress - so even if you lose the latest you have previous versions.

[darcybaston]

We're pretty close to Leopard and the Time Machine, so I'll pass on Retrospect. My working drive is not what I'm backing up. I already have a daily mirror system for that. It's for the 50+ DVDs and equal number of CDs that I want to archive so I can quit flipping through binders upon binders of the things.

I think, after benefitting from your feedback and that of a Mac MUG, what I'll do is just get two 500GB external hard drives. No matter how much time I have before one of them dies, it's still a pretty affordable means of getting high capacity without managing many physical pieces of media. By having two of them, one protects the other's fragility.

[darcybaston]

Plan evolved a little:

For the 2 internal 160GB drives in my Powermac I'll do a RAID 1. This will be for day to day redundancy.

I'll buy 2 external drives, same make and size, and do a RAID 1 on them for archiving.

[Clive]

Not sure really what Time Machine does, but I didn’t see any indication that it is using external media for storage. My guess would be that it is just using "unused" space on your disks.

A couple of big disks sound like a good idea for what you want to do, make some disk images and away you go.