RE: imaging software--disk dupers/MDISC etc

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

No need to change internal drives. Why not buy something like the
LG/Hitachi BP40? Slim Portable Blu-Ray USB external writer; bus powered
so no additional power cable? I too am a great believer in Taiyo Yuden,
but the Department of Defense tests of mdisc versus several brands of
conventional media convinced me of what I had already half faced:
conventional optical media is not reliable, even the best.


I have been cautiously migrating my digital files from system to system
and backup to backup for decades now. Some of my oldest files date from
the 1980s. In spite of zero occasions of operating system notification, I
have lost files I would rather not have lost, over the years. The problem
is, we all have so many files that it's impossible to verify them at any
given time.


One thing your note does is raise an interesting question: when you
backup do you


1. backup from desktop to NAS

2. from NAS to G-Tech External


or do you


1. backup from desktop to NAS

2. separately backup from desktop to G-Tech External


I would guess that going from NAS to External would substantially
increase the possibility of corruption, and that you would be better, in
this kind of scenario, to go from desktop to External.


I use NASs but now primarily for music and video files. I have had too
many NAS filesystem problems to be comfortable with the ones I have used.
That said, I have always used very basic NASs, nothing premium.


One thing is abundantly clear to me :


relying on either Mac or Win COPY commands is utterly useless. Way too
many things can go wrong and not be reported.


So the question is, when using a backup program, how well do they deal
with these 'invisible' problems - - how much error checking and
verification is there? etc. etc. I must admit, when I use ShadowProtect,
I am not aware of how or whether it is verifying my files after write.
This discussion is definitely making me more concerned.


At 29/10/2013 14:49, you wrote:

Take a look at this media
wrap-up.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/cd-rw.html
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/cd-rw.html . Some of it
seems problematic, but the basic info is useful.  For everyday use,
I use Taiyo Yuden. I?ll likely archive to MAM-A Gold or Gold Silver when
I?m finished with the project. I looked at the M-Disk, tempting. At the
moment, don?t feel like taking the PC apart to install an M-Disk optical
drive, which one needs to burn those disks.  

 

Interesting point about file corruption, which is to say continually
backing up a file you do not know is corrupted. You?d never know till you
tried to open that file. I have hundreds of data files ? mp3 interviews,
docx transcriptions, img photo documentation and so on. I only know they
are good at the time I create them and at the time I test them before I
back them up to a 2TB redundant NAS (Synology), then to desktop G-Tech,
finally at night to the cloud, SOS bare-metal. Most files are produced by
PC, though for field use I sometimes work on a MacAir (nice little
machine). At all events, backup and storage are always on my mind.

 

Michael Norman

 

From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx
[mailto:xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx; eudora="autourl">
mailto:xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill
Troop

Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 8:33 AM

To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx

Subject: Re: imaging software--disk dupers/MDISC etc

 

At 29/10/2013 02:55, you wrote:




Are you still using a Mac platform to run Windows?





No, and that's the problem.


I wonder. Robin Harris in his Storage Bits column for ZD has been warning
about HFS instability for years, e.g.




The Storage Bits take Apple designs fabulous hardware, but their
reluctance to invest in a modern file system bodes ill for Mac power
users. Adopting ZFS would have put them ahead of even ReFS, but that
isn't in the cards anymore. The best we can hope for is that someone -
Greenbytes? - offers ZFS as secondary storage for the Mac. But at least
our data at rest will be safe.


Not that NTFS doesn't have problems:


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-microsoft-puts-your-data-at-risk/169
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-microsoft-puts-your-data-at-risk/169If you google the string /robin harris hfs ntfs/ you will get a lot
of interesting hits.


He also has interesting material on failure of SSDs, which most of us
assume are vastly more reliable than HDs. Apparently, you really want to
avoid power failure of SSDs! (with an uninterruptible power supply, for
desktops)


For users with a lot of crucial personal, business or creative data,
there is always the risk that a file will become corrupt without being
reported. This has happened to me more than once over the years.



I think the best solution is to do periodic snapshots that are never
updated. That way, if years later, an old but important file is
discovered to be corrupt or lost, you can go back to (say) a ten-year-old
backup and get the file back.


But what storage material is good for ten years?


Robin Harris was one of the first to publicize


http://www.mdisc.com/which is producing the world's only archival recordable DVDs, with
archival blu-rays on the way.


Maybe it's a mistake to believe in anything, but mdisc seems the only
sensible choice now available for those of us who are serious about
preserving our data indefinitely.