Archival disks.....MDisk?

12 years ago

Have tons of archival family stuff that's important to me. I backup religiously including additional burns to DVD stored at remote location. However, in 15 years experience I have personally seen some of my CD's/DVD's spontaneously deteriorate -- even the high-priced ones. Seeking more permanent storage so that my great-grandkids (if they're even interested) can still access these records.

Blu-Ray? MDisk? What can I do other than updating/refreshing my burns from time-to-time?

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Comments (5)

Elmer J Fudd
12 years ago
What's the total volume of what you have?

Over the relatively short time span of the computer/information age, both software and the format of storage media has changed. Not all that long ago, long term data storage was on reel to reel tapes. Try to find the hardware to read those now, much less any software to use it.

I'd bet most banks (for example) can't access machine readable account records from 15 years ago.

What that says is - storage over time needs to be migrated to new formats and be made compatible with new software.

Would using a few external drives meet your needs? That should safely take you to the next storage generation.
gwarstong
Original Author
12 years ago
About 70gb of important stuff. More coming all the time.

I agree with you about the future, and your suggestion is what I'm doing now. Keep re-burning -- migrating, if you will -- to fresh DVD's and/or HD's. Looking for something that that I can depend on for more than a few years.
Elmer J Fudd
12 years ago
I think you're wasting your time burning dvds. They're physically unstable, slow, bulky, and prone to failure when inserted into a drive.

I just took a quick look on New Egg. A 128 gig Patriot thumb drive (a decent brand) is $48. You can have your pick of 500 gig USB drives (Toshiba, Seagate or WD) for under $60. Get one of one, one of the other, and know that you have plenty of capacity and security for many years into the future.

You want another free backup copy? Maybe you've already done this, but if you have more than one PC in the house, put a copy of your stuff on the other one's hard drive. Most people have unused space on their hard drives.

Edit to add PS:

If you want to join the ranks of the backup paranoid (like me), never have more than one back up copy plugged in or actively being used at the same time. One power surge could take out all copies of the entire collection.

Where I live, we almost never have lightning and few real power surges. Still, I don't take any chances.

This post was edited by snidely on Fri, Feb 14, 14 at 20:30
gwarstong
Original Author
12 years ago
I like what you're saying. This is not something I've looked into. Thanks for suggesting. Smily face : )

Feeling like I'm on the verge of over-think.

FYI...my current MO is to burn two sets of DVD's about every 6-12 months. I keep one set and send the other to a relative. Originals are on the iMac plus automatically backed-up onto Apple Time Capsule. In other words, my important stuff basically resides at four independent locations, one of them off-premises. I'm thinking that might qualify as "backup paranoid".
DA_Mccoy
12 years ago
Multiple copies over multiple medias. Nothing has been time tested rather only estimated.

There is a difference between traditional quality cd/dvd and an archival quality product.

Though all our work stations are independent PCs our office backs up nightly via the network onto the main frame, and then again onto off site storage; two places.

DA