DVD or HD?

corblimey

I'm interested in people's opinions on this. I've been getting things from the cousins for many many years and before I would just burn them in batches to a bunch of cheapish DVDs I have. I don't take out the DVDs very often so I don't know if there's a high failure rate, but certainly the ones I've got back to recently seem ok. But I'm wondering if I should invest in a couple of hard drives instead. If I back everything up to 1 500gig hard drive and then just store that away somewhere, is it any more or less corruptible than a burned DVD? I know it's difficult to say, but I've lost several hard drives over the years, and wonder if DVD is a more stable way to go (it's a pain they only hold whatsit 4.7gigs)

Blazer

As anyone will tell you...use both

My boss is a professional photographer with hundred's of GBs of photos.
He had a backup on his pc, which in turn is backed to a NAS box plus also DVD backup...
Never have one source of backup...golden rule...well after the one about always back shít up

corblimey

Berkut wrote: »

As anyone will tell you...use both

My boss is a professional photographer with hundred's of GBs of photos.
He had a backup on his pc, which in turn is backed to a NAS box plus also DVD backup...
Never have one source of backup...golden rule...well after the one about always back shít up

Yeah, I'm starting to think that might be the best option. backing up DVD is such a complete pain in the ass though, whereas backing up to HD is pretty easy. Backup to PC is not an option currently, none of my machines have that much disk space.

tman

Ideally have important stuff backed up to 2 hard drives... It's a sad fact of life that hard drives fail all the time, I've lost some irreplaceable pictures thanks to that:(

Depends on how important the stuff is to you really... Surely your "cousins" could just "send" your the files again in the offchance that it did get corrupted.
I personally favour backing up to hard drives over DVDs - far less hassle, and cheap DVDs degrade/peel after a few years.

sceptre

I used to back up my music files to DVD.

The I realised when I got things sorted on the hard drive that I would need a few hundred DVDs to complete the job within a year or two.

Hard drive backups IMHO unless it's really convenient for you to do DVDs (in other words, if you haven't got a great deal of stuff to be backed up). Then again, I'm looking at a few terabytes of need, and while I'm sure there are plenty of people out there with higher requirements, I'm towards the high usage area as home users go.

DVDs definitely good for photos though for most of us.

monkeypants

Backup to at least two hard disks. Burned DVDs deteriorate over time.

JDxtra

And store them in seperate locations. Theft, fire and even a virus could wipe out the lot if they are all stored (and connected) together.

chrism2007

ironic that paper can last 1000s of years and hard drives cant last a few

Overheal

Thats where SSDs are coming in. Hard Disk's greatest weakness has been its moving parts. Flash has also inherently been its maximum entropy for read-write operations: they 'die' from overuse similarly to HDDs, though probably with more predictability. As a backup solution they would work great and the data could be preserved for centuries (but who cares) while enduring all sorts of bumps and bangs. In day to day operation however they will wear out within ~7-15 years based on use amount.

corblimey wrote: »

Yeah, I'm starting to think that might be the best option. backing up DVD is such a complete pain in the ass though, whereas backing up to HD is pretty easy. Backup to PC is not an option currently, none of my machines have that much disk space.

Blu Ray burners are cheap enough now to the point where its almost worth considering. you can store 25gb per single layer. Prototypes from early phase were burning as high as 200gb and future projections are looking at 1tb-5tb per disc by the end of the format's lifespan. For backing up music and photos it seems ideal. Leave the videos to hard drives for the moment.

the_syco

Be sure not to buy cheap DVD's. Use Datawrite yellow label myself, which seem to have a long life, and can be read in different systems. Have used cheap DVD's in the past, only for them to fail after a few months.