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Topic: Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless? (Read 27840 times) previous topic - next topic
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Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #100 –
I like the idea of putting music ona  few hds and being safe  but for cdrs...  to keep the file names I normally rar/zip them up...  if you have time u can always turn recovery on in rar and do like 30%...    if the cdr does go funky the rar can rebuild itself.

if u don't rar all the way and just burn individual files you could always make 2-3 par files to go with em' just incase.


oh yea powering down a drive isn't going to make it last any longer, a drive that runs 24/7 is going to last longer than spining up and down 10 times a day.  frys has 120gig maxtor drives for $149 with a $80 mail in rebait for a total of $69  pretty damn cheap, if i wasn't broke i'd just buy a few of those and copy over my music and unplug them and let them sit somewhere safe.

raid5 and crap seems like a lot of work for little gain, paying for a card that'll do it, and then the fact that u still only really have 1 copy of your files, and if u get a virus or u go insane one day and delete something its gone    the only cds i've lost were a few when i downloaded some sh*t ass program that decided to tag my ape files and crap and didn't know how or something cause they couldn't be played again and ma frontend wouldnt' decode them.  anyways point is raid5 woudln't of helped me hehe

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #101 –
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oh yea powering down a drive isn't going to make it last any longer, a drive that runs 24/7 is going to last longer than spining up and down 10 times a day


Is this your personal opinion or do you have some proof for this?

For my backup drives I rarely access them more than once every 2-3 days and i have to start wondering if spinning down the drive is more detremental to the drive than leaving it on, why they give you this feature in the OS? This is also a feature of all SCSI controllers as well.
 

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #102 –
Thats just what I've always read...  maybe askin on storagereview or anandtech's high tech forum..  dunno.  If you look at specs on segate or maxtors site they only list spinups/down, # of hours isn't even listed.  Tho one of them says the drive is meant to last 5 years.    Every few days i think is fine, I'm just thinking about my laptop that desides to spin up and down every 2 minutes for soem reason... i can't see that being good for a normal hd.  I don't see any reason to spin down your mian drive I guess.

I think in the end how you treat the drive means much less than the luck in picking a good drive.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #103 –
par2 is probably much better than par for this type of use, worth a look at the discussion at this HA thread, and we could use some input for those who are very knowledgeable about errors on CDRs

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #104 –
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For my backup drives I rarely access them more than once every 2-3 days and i have to start wondering if spinning down the drive is more detremental to the drive than leaving it on,

I work at an ISP and we often use the same drives in workstations and in servers (as raid5). The drives that die are the drives in workstations witch are shutdown at least once a day. The last one was a 3 month old Cheetah X15, it simply decided to not spin up anymore one morning.

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why they give you this feature in the OS?

To save power (especially in laptops), not the life of you disks.

However, old (really old) IDE-Drives have not been designed to run 24/7.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #105 –
http://www.raidweb.com/images/4bayfront.jpg

That's what i use to store my data. It's an external IDE 2 SCSI tower, running XFS on raid 5, controlled by a gentoo box in my case. If one of the drives dies, it tells me witch one, i pull it out (hotswapable) a new one in, wait a few minutes and have everything back to normal - nothing more to do. You don't need any special drivers, the OS just sees it as one big scsi drive.

I don't do any more backups, because the chance that 2 drives will die in the same second is pretty small. It's usualy exported read-only via NFS and samba and if there is data that needs to be added to it, i logon to the gentoo box and 'pull' it from the network, so there is no chance for a virus or sth. And even if the drive would be mounted in read/write and a virus on my NT-box would delete all files on the drive, i wouldn't care much, because the files are only deleted in the filetable and not physically and i can easly restore them.  And even if all drives die in the same second for some unrealistic reason it's most likely possible to restore 99% of the data on them. It's really hard to loose data unrecoverable 

..But in case you're really paranoid, just get a dvd-recorder and do a fullbackup every few months.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #106 –
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I don't do any more backups, because the chance that 2 drives will die in the same second is pretty small.

Just to be nit-picky here:  You're probably more likely to lose data from a software failure than a hardware failure, at least in my experience.

Do you have spare drives to recover onto?

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #107 –
What about this simply idea for backuping music files:

I`ll have 2 hard drives:

Barracuda IV 80GB (reccomended : silent/shock resist) - only for audio files backup, I will connect to my workstation every 2 weeks for synchronize dirs, then I will plug it off phisicly , and put it to some safe, closed place.

Main HD in my computer : another Barracuda 80 or 120 GB, with all THE SAME files saved on it

file system : NTFS on XP (much more relaible than FATs, has self-heeling capabilities, self-monitoring and so) both HDs with S.M.A.R.T. system on in BIOS

I think by this way my files are safe, only thing that could destroy them is total disaster like fire or killer attack of some horrible monster from outer space  . 

but this could destroy any kind of media

chance that both HDs will fail in the same time is very small, I trust Seagate`s drives,
and I`m tired of burning tons of CDRs

any comments ?

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #108 –
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I have never had a drive die from wear

We sometimes do. They are old 500 MB hard drives in Vectra VE 5/75 (Pentium 75) computers. They are shut down several times a year only. They are heavily used 10 hours /24, 7 days /7.
But we can't know in which conditions of heat and dust they have worked during these years.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #109 –
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I trust Seagate`s drives,

I did that in the past, too 

...for some reason i now prefer to trust in maxtor

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #110 –
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I don't do any more backups, because the chance that 2 drives will die in the same second is pretty small.

Just to be nit-picky here:  You're probably more likely to lose data from a software failure than a hardware failure, at least in my experience.

True, but I can't really think of what kind of failure that should be, XFS is a filesystem that i'd consider 'rock solid'. It has proven it has reliability in huge SGI server farms for many years. There where some problems in early linux implementations, but i think that's history. Besides this i copy the files from the raid to the NT box, in case i have to edit them and back after success.

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Do you have spare drives to recover onto?

I have one replacement disk for the raid, but no, I don't have enough space to recover that whole raid. I guess in that case i have to lend diskspace from friends for the time of recover.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #111 –
Unusual that none of you have mentioned DVDRAM, since it's a medium and technology designed purely for the purpose of personal long-term reliable data storage. In fact, with this in mind it has extra error correction and defect management designed into it from the outset!

I'm very disappointed this technology didn't take off for personal data archiving because as an owner of one of these drives all I can say is that they're far superior to DVDR/RW.

The drives are cheaper than DVDRW and although the cartridge based media is more expensive, it's much better quality and protected from handling due to the fact it's sold as a long term and reliable storage solution.

Do some reading and I think you'll be impressed - error detection and random seek read/write as well as a huge number of writing cycles. Each disk is basically a removable hard drive, but alot cheaper. None of this waiting for Mt.Rainer support that never seems to arrive - a much better solution is already out.

Think large huge capacity minidisks and you'll get the idea.

It's best to use the cartridge disks with their protective covers which now come in 9+GB sizes, although the drives can also write standard DVDRs or un-housed DVDRAM. The disks can be removed from the cartridges and read in modern DVD drives, although the only reason I can think of doing this is if your DVDRAM drive dies.


As for CDR/RW:

I've just read this thread and other similar topics across a wide spectrum of forums, all I can say is I'm shocked!

This can't be right can it?

Surely they must last longer than this or what's the point?

We should really have a go at companies leading us to believe that CDRs are an extremely safe archiving method. I'm certain that 90% of peeps out there assume CDRs will last a flippin long time.

My old Amiga 500 collection of 3.5" DD disks are 12-15 years old and they all still work perfectly! No read errors! I know because I recently just transferred the whole collection to my PC. And the amount of abuse they've had is unreal! I'm writing the info over to CD thinking it'll be safer before the disks finally do give up, but they might outlast the CD's!

I expected CD technology to have a better lifespan than this - 25 years minimum!

Is this is how crap organic material can be for storage? We might as well go back to magnetic media!

No, no. It can't be right. You'll all probably be backing up info to dvdr in the next 2-3 years, but again will those disks have short lifespans?

Go DVDRAM, like I just have.

I'm still not convinced cdrs are this crap.......................mine are still fine from 2-3 years ago. I think some of you must have had a really crap writer or duff reader too. Or live near a nuclear power plant. 

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #112 –
I think I read that DVD-RAM does use the same magneto-optical storage physics as MiniDisc.

What happens in MiniDisc is that the tightly-focussed writing laser briefly heats up a tiny spot of magnetic material to over its Curie temperature - the temperature where its magnetic domains can be easily magnetised in different directions (e.g. North/South) - a sort of melting point for the magnetic property. This is done in the presence of a magnetic field (which isn't focussed as tightly as the laser spot), but because only the part in the spot is above the Curie temperature, only that part changes in response to the magnetic field. It cools below the Curie temperature rapidly when the spot moves on so it won't be affected by the magnetic field switch during the next bit being written.

The reading process is much more like a regular CD, where the material reflects or doesn't according to the magnetic orientation. (I can't remember now whether it's the reflectivity that changes or it's an interference effect - e.g. due to a change in refractive index or rotating the plane of polarisation). Pre-pressed miniDiscs, conversely, work just like CDs.

This effect is intrinsically re-writable and requires not just a high temperature but a sufficiently strong magnetic field to cause a change of state.

So, for example, the random distriubution of energy states in a material doesn't lead to a small but finite probability of the energy (temperature) being high enough to cause the transition in the odd molecule or two even at room temperature, which MIGHT be the case with CD-Rs because the magnetic field isn't strong enough to cause the bit to change. People say that diamonds are forever, but it's actually a metastable state of carbon at room temperature. The rate of change is incredibly slow, but it's very very gradually turning into graphite (i.e. pencil lead) - i.e. the reaction rate is just amazingly slow at room temperature because the activation energy is rarely reached with the random fluctuation of energy levels (jiggling atoms in layman's terms) at room temperature.

As I understand it, CD-R dyes change from a metastable room-temperature state to a stable lower-energy state when enough activation energy is supplied, which typically occurs fully above a particular transition temperature. However, even at room temperature, energy fluctuates, and slowly the reaction will still progress. Also photons (e.g. sunlight/UV) can supply the energy to activate the reaction, so gradually more and more molecules of the dye might be converted.

It seems that the supposedly least stable dyes are used in the best CD-R discs (e.g. Taiyo Yuden), and they're best because fewer errors are present in manufacture, so clearly dye stability is far from the only issue, and it might be that it's a slow enough to be like diamonds turning to graphite - theoretically not forever, but for all intents and purposes not a problem in terms of human lifetime. After all, the error correction is pretty resilient to errors in quite a proportion of the bits. But of course, some CD-ROM drives stop reading or tracking the laser beam focus accurately when the reflectivity or transmissivity of the disc gets degraded below a certain point, for exampe, so it might have nothing to do with the dye, and more to do with the encapsulant degrading, for example.

It's my experience that miniDiscs of quite a few years old are still in good shape, even those left in cars in summer. I don't have many old CD-R's but one or two data CD-RW's became corrupted after a few years.

However, I can't say whether it's due to the reading equipment, the medium, the error correction layer or what, so it's very hard to draw a firm conclusion.

I would be tempted to expect that DVD-RAM would be rather resilient (plus it can be refreshed (rewritten) from time to time, to reduce the underlying bit-error ratio) and have the advantage of a protective case. Then again, it might go out of fashion and become a Betamax-like format that I'll never be able to read if my drive goes wrong and no replacement is available. It's also probably more expensive and supported by fewer companies.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #113 –
Sorry to ask, but so what exactly is the accepted standard of CD scanning and checkup?

Insofar as I can see, right now what most people do is to run Nero CD Speed (v1.02g latest ) and use the CD Quality Test from there. A CDR in good condition should optimally return 0 errors, and the graph should largely be linear ( i.e. no spikes or sudden jumps )... any spikes / errors indicate the beginnings of a failing CDR and steps should be taken?

Would I be right in saying this? Also, does ScanDisc under the Extra Menu of CD Speed offer any help in diagnosing if a CDR is in good condition?


-----------------------------

Anyway, a comment on the issue of using harddisks versus CDRs ( and like media )... I would just like to point out that not everyone can afford a new harddisk, a new RAID IDE/SCSI card or even a new computer just to backup their stuff. While the harddisk may have better storage/price ratios as compared to a CDR ( not really sure ), the one thing that many people fail to factor in is that a harddisk is a much larger purchase as opposed to CDRs. CDRs continue to offer a low-cost, reasonable, on-the-fly storage solution that the harddisk as yet cannot be matched..

So while RAID5 setups would be the way to go in the future, I sincerely hope that there still will be work carried out on improving exisiting CDR reliability & technology, be it on the hardware or software side.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #114 –
@Daybreak
Thats the way I check my CDs - I have been lucky that almost none have had any non-recoverable errors. Although I can see one brand I bought a few years ago is starting to get bad results - probably the dye they used - I've therefore dumped most of those CDs onto HD.
I don't think there is a standard - If you actually test your CDs once a year your probably doing more than +90% of people who toss them around waiting to get scratched, nicked, or become a coffee plate.

As for your comment - I think most people (at least me  ) understand about finanicial limitations that the cost of buying some blank CDs is sometimes all you want or can spend money on, compared with the cost of a HD. The price/GB fluctuates in different parts of the world but here the price/GB for HD is lower than CDs and that margin will only be growing as the HDs keep getting bigger. I think in the long run the HD is a better choice since it is cheaper, its more convient than burning CDs all the time, and you far less likely to lose data compared to a CD. But you are correct that it does take the extra cash to buy it. These are all choices people make and I'm not the one to say you buying CDs is wrong, because if I was in your situation then I might make the same choice. One of the reasons of places like this is to get others views about things like this and judge for yourself if their suggestions have merit and might be better.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #115 –
That is the 'big issue'  : both CD-Rs and HDs have their drawbacks, e.g a HD can crash... so a multiple HD (or RAID) system is more than just luxury. Moreover DVD-R (or DVD+R) could be an alternative to (sometimes too small) CD-R.

DVD formats should also be more resistant to data corruption due to scratches. I have no clue about its 'chemical stability' (does it perform better than CD-R?). Would be nice to know  But probably we'll have to wait a few years untill we can all tell our experiences concerning the matter in a thread like this one

EDIT: I prefer HD over CD-R as you do, but I think that for a single HD (no 'backup HD' or RAID system) the risk of data loss is still high.

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #116 –
DVD formats, unfortunately, suffer from some hindrances to widespread adoption by the masses as it is.

Firstly (and IMHO) , the lack of a clear standard for the writable and re-writeable formats is probably holding back some people.

Secondly, the price of the drives themselves. They are way expensive, much more costly than a CD-RW drive and even most harddisks... This may in part stem from the first problem, as manufacturers simply have to support too many formats..

Thirdly, and this is a chicken-and-egg problem, DVD drives are still not a standard PC peripheral in the vein of the CDROM/RW... Very little stuff ( with the notable exception of movies ) comes on DVDs, hence a DVD drive is still not seen as a must-have.

Having said that, I might be looking into getting a combined CDRW/DVD drive to replace my aging LiteOn burner...

Lossless Cd-r Backup Worthless?

Reply #117 –
Quote
Sorry to ask, but so what exactly is the accepted standard of CD scanning and checkup?


Yes, but the devices needed to measure CD quality are very expensive (~3000 $) http://www.cloversystems.com/

There are some softs available that allows to measure the Bler, jitter etc of CD with an ordinary drive, but few drives are supported, and the results are highly drive dependant, thus can't be compared between users.

KProbe :
http://home.pchome.com.tw/cool/cdtools/
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=10234

Plextools pro with Plexwriter Premium :
http://www.plextor.be/english/technical/plextools.asp

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any spikes / errors indicate the beginnings of a failing CDR and steps should be taken?


Yes. I got one or two errors on freshly burned CDRs. I didn't pay attention, and they died in one year only.

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does ScanDisc under the Extra Menu of CD Speed offer any help in diagnosing if a CDR is in good condition?


No, it has been found to report less errors that the quality check.