21st century data backup

[justus1900]

Problem with DVD. I know this is going to sound really stupid but put the old DVD disc in the Freezer at you house for about an hour in a closed zip lock bag. then have another Hard Drive all ready. Take the DVD disc out of the freezer input in a CD ROM Drive and transfer the information as fast as possible before the DVD disc warms up. Doesnt allways work but has worked for me many, many times. Cant hurt to try.

[John_Toolbox]

Very intriguing. I just have to ask... How on earth did you ever figure this out?

[Digitopian]

I thought that method was for hard drives and had something to do with the actual plates (discs) within the hard drive......... oh well, whatever works!

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by Digitopian

I thought that method was for hard drives and had something to do with the actual plates (discs) within the hard drive......... oh well, whatever works!

Its interesting if it works. I haven't had any need to try it yet. Or the HDD trick.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

First off, what brand of media are you using? ... I've had problems with several DVD backups that were 2-3 years old...

Try reading those DVDs on a different drive. Once my burners start to get iffy I replace them, usually every 2 years or so. I have 2 burners. I burn on one and then restore the dvd on the other one, to check the burned dvd. Next session I flip flop burners. By this method I keep tabs on the condition of the drives, and am alerted to possible trouble early on. PIA bit it works. Brand of blanks has never been an issue for me. Hope this helps!!!

[1ace1]

Originally Posted by justus1900

I know this is going to sound really stupid but put the old DVD disc in the Freezer at you house for about an hour in a closed zip lock bag. then have another Hard Drive all ready. Take the DVD disc out of the freezer input in a CD ROM Drive and transfer the information as fast as possible before the DVD disc warms up. Doesnt allways work but has worked for me many, many times. Cant hurt to try.

Hmmmmm!

Hard Drives are 'thermo magneto' in the way they work where as DVDR's use a 'thermo photo polymer dye' to store data, both use temperature to save data. So it kinda makes sense that some form of temperature change would change how they work. Never heard of the freezer thing before though (maybe it makes the two states of the photo polymer dye more effective so it absorbs/reflects the lazer with greater effeciancy!!?).

I've always found, when backing up large sessions to CD or DVD that there are normally one or two files that will be corrupt (in particular when transfering the backup data).

Becuase of this I prefer HD's for back up.

A:)

[themadarchitect]

Ever tried imaging software to an External HD? Works great for me. Preserve the back up drives by ONLY turning them on when they need to be backed up. Once a week I also make a back up of the back up.

Every time I finish recording a session, it gets a rewritable DVD assigned to it. I update the DVDevery time I work on the sessuib.

Redundancy is the best.

I have had the problem of not being able to read DVD's a few months after burning them. But since I got in the habit of verifying each image I haven't had that problem since. It can't hurt to try other DVD drives. Maybe your DVD driver or encoder went corrupt and it is no longer able to read that disk. If it can't read in any drive, you burnt corrupt data to the disc and the drive cannot reassemble the info.

If you want to be really anal (which you should be if you have projects that people are paying you to work on) I would partition my backup drives in half. Back up to one partition and have that partition being shadowed to the next partition. Add that to what I already mentioned and you have 4 backup sources to choose from. Get really fancy and store one of those drives off location in case of fire or other natural disasters.

I also work for a studio that keeps a P.O Box that they mail only their HD or DVD backups too. That way you always have an off site backup.

[sunburst79]

21st Century data backup. Truthfully to me this would imply storage in the form of cloud storage. What I think would be cool would be to have a group of users or studios get together and figure out a way to mirror their data on secure server shares. Example.... say 6-12 DUC members get together and build a "Mesh". Your chances of any single machine going down are minimal. The chance of losing the whole network would be almost impossible. The only drawbacks I see is keeping the individuals data secure and some type of effective non lossy compression. Given the price of 2TB drives it wouldn't be to hard to build something with enough capacity.

While not a replacement for local HDD backups something like this could take the place of the backup of a backup thats off site.
No reason that all of this sycronization could be happening automatically during idle time.

Think something like Mozy thats self administered.

[M-ManLA]

I would make sure your DVD burner is good (I get Sony drives for the most part. Lite On and Verbatim are also good. The last time I tried a Pioneer, it Blue-Screened on my clients machine like crazy). Get DVD+R/W Disc, as they are more stable in a backup environment. DON'T GET CHEAP DISC (Like the Dynex disc at Best Buy, they are very unreliable). I would get a good CD Manager program as well like Nero or Roxio (There are also free alternatives that are good. They Linux community has a handful of them that will work in Windows or Macs). As an addition to your DVD backup, I would suggest buying (or get a buddy to assemble one for you) a NAS box in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 Configuration for the hard drives. That way if one drive is lost, the data will be on another drive.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by M-ManLA

I would make sure your DVD burner is good (I get Sony drives for the most part. Lite On and Verbatim are also good. The last time I tried a Pioneer, it Blue-Screened on my clients machine like crazy). Get DVD+R/W Disc, as they are more stable in a backup environment. DON'T GET CHEAP DISC (Like the Dynex disc at Best Buy, they are very unreliable). I would get a good CD Manager program as well like Nero or Roxio (There are also free alternatives that are good. They Linux community has a handful of them that will work in Windows or Macs). As an addition to your DVD backup, I would suggest buying (or get a buddy to assemble one for you) a NAS box in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 Configuration for the hard drives. That way if one drive is lost, the data will be on another drive.

I no longer own the burner in question, but it was a pioneer. Looking at NAS at the moment, my sessions are spread out across macs and PC's now thanks to audioport unviversal.