Re: Labeling backup DVD+RW's
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 03:49:29AM EST, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
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> Chris Jones wrote:
> > Is there an altogether better/smarter/reliabl-er solution?
>
> IMHO, the smartest, fastest, most reliable and cheapest solution is to
> use external hard disks like usb-disks. You could reuse the same disk
> for more or less unlimited rw-cycles for an average lifetime of at least
> around 3 years (probably much longer, since it is not in permanent use).
> By the time it dies it has quite certain been much cheaper and
> environment friendly than all those dvd-rws plus the burner. Current
> hard disks have capacities of more than hundreds of DVD's.
Raises a few other issues.
1. How do I determine if a modern USB drive will work with USB 1.1?
2. What brand, model, size do you recommend?
3. With only one USB port .. I'll need a hub.. will that work?
4. Will the old laptop provide enough power .. er, to drive the drive?
5. ..
I'm currently writing my backups to an 8GB flash drive.. and manually copy
them over to a DVD+RW .. once in a while .. So I have everything immediately
available if I need to restore a couple of files .. and of course, I'd have
something to recover from .. should a power surge toast the laptop & anything
connected to it, for instance.
In essence, I'm pretty much using the solution you recommend .. with the
difference that flash drives are easier to carry around but considerably more
expensive than external HD's.
Granted, the much larger HD would give me more flexibility, but it still might
make sense to copy some of the backup contents to external media once in a
while.. consumer-grade stuff like DVD's being the only stuff I can afford.
> The main advantage, however, is that it is much, much faster (at least a
> factor of 10 on my system). Typical data transfer rates of usb disks are
> on the order of 1 GB/min. Plus you have about 100 times more space in
> one place.
With USB 1.1 .. wouldn't that be slower than an IDE DVD burner (?)
Not that I care about speed.. my backup script runs at 1:00 AM and I really
only need it to end before my other cron jobs (updatedb, log rotations) kick
off at 6:30 AM or thereabout.
> If you choose your backup strategy cleverly, an external hard disk can
> serve as a drop-in replacement for the hard disk of your computer,
> whenever that should be required.
Are you thinking of disaster recovery .. if/when the internal HD fails?
> I've read quite a few tests that showed that DVDs and CDs are not very
> reliable as backup media. It gets worse if they get reused, because
> their performance degrades on subsequent burn cycles.
My gut feeling as well.. I've seen disturbing things with rewriteable CD's.
> Of course YMMV, that is just my personal experience ;-)
>
> I've just verified, that I can label the silver aluminium housing of my
> usb disk with a pencil.
:-)
Thanks for your comments.
CJ
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