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bachus



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 6:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

jksuperstar wrote:
Tape drives today don't use ferrite heads anymore, they use magneto-resistive elements,


Thanks for the interesting update on tape. I kinda suspected things might have changed in the past 15 years. These computer thingies change fast Smile

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jksuperstar



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I design the things to pay for my hobbies, and being an engineer, I only get to see the worst of the worst that gets sent back from manufacturing. But even knowing what I do, I'd still trust a tape drive over optical media at this point. Even though I'm forced ($$$) to use DVDs at home.
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mosc
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 8:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Yes, I don't have any links to point to, but I've read a lot of horror stories about people who have CDRs they thought had their archives on turning out to have gone bad over time - in some cases as little as two years. Some claim that light will ruin them. Tapes may be better.

Still, the best thing is to use multiple of what ever stragegy you use.

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jksuperstar



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 9:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I've heard that burning at 1x speed is the most reliable, since each bit is burned for a longer time into the media, the disc will "last longer". The speed of the disc is also more stable, and will be written with less jitter.

Most disc manufacturers that accept CD-roms as masters require writing at 1x probably for this reason.
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bachus



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 10:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I have to say my preference for archival storage remains gold film optical. But definitely multiple copies.
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destroyifyer



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:19 pm    Post subject: on cd backup... Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

For those who will stick to CD backup, all i could reccomend would be to burn you backup as an Audio cd, as opposed to a Data cd.

I mean, decay of Audio CD music does take a real long time, long enough to take a breath in-between backups i guess.


goodbye
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bachus



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

This doesn't seem to be an issue that has gotten much real research. I have found no comparisons of tape versus gold film optical. And no research papers on gold film CD. Believe it or not the best I could come up with is this.

http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2106/2106article14.htm

If anybody has anything better please share it.

One consideration is that if your read device fails and a replacement is unavailable you're completely up the creek. Tape drive formats are proprietary and the drives are likely to disappear before those for a given optical standard. As yet it does not seem to be a simple clear cut issue to me. But more data would surely help.

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ian-s



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

jksuperstar wrote:
I've heard that burning at 1x speed is the most reliable, since each bit is burned for a longer time into the media, the disc will "last longer". The speed of the disc is also more stable, and will be written with less jitter.

Most disc manufacturers that accept CD-roms as masters require writing at 1x probably for this reason.


I have read that although burning at a drives maximum rate is probably not a good idea, some drives minimum error rates are achieved at moderate speeds like 8x or 16x. Testing seems to be difficult as errors are quite rare unless you use those nasty 5cent per disk brands.

Does anyone recall how bad floppy disks got in terms of retention during the end of that era? I had verified data just vanish in a months.
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 11:08 am    Post subject: Re: on cd backup... Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

teradacto wrote:
For those who will stick to CD backup, all i could reccomend would be to burn you backup as an Audio cd, as opposed to a Data cd.

I mean, decay of Audio CD music does take a real long time, long enough to take a breath in-between backups i guess.


That depends on how the things will be used. With an Audio (Red Book) format, you get slightly more space, but less error correction as a data format has (yellow or green books). You don't hear these errors in a cd-player, because everything is interpolated to remove any clicks and pops that might occur due to dust, errors, etc. You're also limited to stereo 16-bit, 44.1kHz audio.

For data formatted discs, errors won't be ignored as they are on audio cds, so they seem more prone to errors, even though the opposite is true.

Either way, if you ever clean cd's, do it from the center out. Since the disc is reading in a spiral, any scratches you make from the center out will be very short when the disc is being read, and would be more readily correctable, while scratches that are arc-shaped and concentric to the disc will look very large, and prevent data from being recovered.
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Uncle Krunkus
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 7:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I hear about people going to their CD backups to find that the disk is unreadable every other week! They are definately not reliable. Generally I reckon the safest place for data is on a hard drive. Though not the one you use everyday. You can get a caddy that will turn any hard drive into a USB drive for just AUS$40. With one of these you can use any drive you like, swap to a second one for added security, and the drive is only used for the backup, so it should last for ages. We get lots of lightning strikes, so it has to be something that has no connection to the outside world 99% of the time.
If you use CDs, don't use re-writables, burn at a slow speed, and re-do them every 6months even if nothing has changed.

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Uncle Krunkus
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 7:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

g2ian wrote:

Does anyone recall how bad floppy disks got in terms of retention during the end of that era? I had verified data just vanish in a months.


I used to advise people not to store floppy disks near credit cards,.......Because the credit card will probably wipe the disk!! Laughing

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elektro80
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 8:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

In most cases, backing up a modern DAW does require a well thought out strategy. First of all, a song file is not really just a file, it is rather a project with lotsa different files involved all over the place. What you might want to do is making full backups that will capture both the state of the PC/Mac ( OS versions, plugins etc, DAW version and then all the related project subfiles that are dependant on this very state of the machine. That is why I recommend doing both incremental backups with snapshots ( which should capture the full state of the machine) and also regular ful backups of everything. tape is the way to go. This is the most flexible and cheapest in the long run. The backup software is important too. A reasonably good app is Retrospect from EMC/DANTZ http://www.dantz.com I have used Retrospect for some 15 years or more and it has always performed 100%.

Retrospect can be run over a network, so you can use any decent mac or PC for this. A G4 400mhz Powermac wil do just fine. Retrospect does also support the use of CD or DVD, not just tape. However, tape is best. CD or DVD is best IMO for archiving data and is not fit for backup.

Important: Always run a verification of the data. This applies both for CD/DVD and tape.

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bachus



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

OK. I'll agree, RAID, to tape, to archival CD.
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 1:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Right.. and those high heel pumps are optional.

Posted Image, might have been reduced in size. Click Image to view fullscreen.

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bachus



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

elektro80 wrote:
Right.. and those high heel pumps are optional.

Good thing, there won't be much left over for accessories Smile

OMG Any woman who would wear those things... -- I mean shades of foot binding. Shocked Lordy what ever happened to feminism!?

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destroyifyer



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PostPosted: Tue May 02, 2006 4:12 pm    Post subject: hi
Subject description: hi
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in reflection of my past recording methods, relying on CD-R backup has got to be the biggest mistake of my musical life

100% honestly

good luck,

teradacto
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