Consumer Reports - Recommends Optical Backup!

I was recently looking at an article from Consumer Reports.

They recommended the best way to backup personal data and photos is to CD or DVD.

They fail to mention the expected life of CD-R's and DVD-R's is only a few years. :thinking:

I wonder how many people have lost data by depending on optical storage? :mecry:

I personally practice backups to a couple external hard drives. One at home, one in my bank lockbox. This is based on experts who say magnetic backup is best. Even if the HD crashes, the data can be recovered.

Consumer Reports has good information, but I have found their recommendations should not be taken as Gospel.

Couldn't have said it better. I use cd's and dvd's and two hard drives also. There is no perfect answer but paper is still the best storage medium.

Don't forget online storage: Last year, Francis Ford Coppola's house was broken into and thieves stole not only his computer but also all his backup drives - 15 years' worth of writing and family photographs gone forever. If he'd had an online backup service, a few clicks from any other computer and all the data would be just as he'd left it.

As long as your data is off-site, anything that happens to your site doesn't affect your data.

See the highest-ranked service here: http://www.carbonite.com/

I read a study years back about optical media and they said certain brands would last 50 years or more while others maybe 10. A lot has to do with the binding materials used they said. Unless you have a small amount of data it gets tougher and tougher to back up 50+ gigs on optical media and until they get blueray RW media or even cheap dual layer RW media you are limited to about 4Gigs a disk and the backup speed while you can buy an external drive for under $100 that is a lot faster to use which encourages you to backup more often and can hold multiple backups on it which is even better if one backup has something you deleted before another backup was made. I think the issue for me about online backups is security. Imagine the contents of your entire hard drive streaming over the internet through multiple servers back and forth. Just kinda creeps me out lol

Lynx_Arc said:

I think the issue for me about online backups is security. Imagine the contents of your entire hard drive streaming over the internet through multiple servers back and forth. Just kinda creeps me out lol

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The service I noted above uses encryption at all stages, so even if your data were somehow intercepted, there'd be no way to view it.

Rush Limbaugh uses and promotes Carbonite, so it must be good, right? LOL! Actually, I thought about using it, but then read this FAQ...which I don't consider secure. Besides, their limits on GB transfer per day up/down would not meet my needs for wanting to be back online now.

If you learn about optical media brand quality and write speeds, you find which have long term storage longevity rates (over 30 years). That's plenty of time when you realize how rapidly new data storage methods evolve. Off site backup of storage media is a well known procedure. Too bad for Copola that he didn't follow it.

So most of us that have been around probably have had a cd writer for more then ten years now. Every had any cds you know where good copies that no longer work?

geepondy said:

So most of us that have been around probably have had a cd writer for more then ten years now. Every had any cds you know where good copies that no longer work?

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Just for fun, I pulled out a CDR I burned in 98. Duke Nukem anyone?

I use an external USB HD, and this service:

http://www.jungledisk.com/