Re: DVDs vs external Hard Drives
- From: KR <kenreed1999@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:51:59 -0700 (PDT)
On Aug 17, 9:33 pm, Ron Cliborn <Ron...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I back up a fairly large amount of Data each year, around 2 to 3
terabytes.
In the past I have backed it up to DVD's and in the past 10 years I
had maybe 5 discs go bad, all the same brand.
Now with the inexpensive external hard drives out, I was thinking of
using them to back up my data. I was wondering how long an external
HD (eHD) would last compared to a DVD.
I realize that anything with moving parts will fail at some point but
I'm trying to weight what is best a DVD or eHD for backing up data.
If the data is extremely sensitive, it would be no problem to use both
and or any other option.
Discs can and do get scratched, broken, lost and misplaced.
There is the significant amount of time involved in burning 3TB to
DVD's.
eHD's seem like a better option. An eHD that hold 500 GB is not all
that much more then the # of DVD's required to hold that amount of
info, and the time savings are significant.
What would one look for, the MTBF for DVD's vs eHD's?
I would like to see what others thought about this. Or maybe their is
a better, cheaper and speeder option for doing this that I don't know
about.
If the Gurus in this group would be so kind as to help me with this
I'd be forever grateful. Any opinions or comments welcomed.
It would just seem better to me to have a eHD dedicated to holding
certain information.....to make it relevant to all, say 1 eHD
dedicated to each of the following:
---Family Picture
---Family Videos
---Family Documents
---Music
---Movies
What do you all think about this?
Thank you
Ron-E-C
"Give me 10 and the do it again!"
We have used hard drives for backup since 2005. 6 (200-300gb Western
Digital) units from then are still in use. These hold a weekly backup,
where long term stuff was burnt to DVD (DVD at the time was cheaper).
None of these drives have failed.
Due to inconvenience and space, we recently spent some days
transferring to 1TB hard drives, and found there were significant
failure issues with the DVD media. (probably 1 disc out of every roll
of 50 had a read error on 1-2 files. - fortunately we have about 6 dvd
readers on hand and most of the bad discs could be read successfully
on particular drives and the data recovered. These drives were the
same brand and all new so I dont know the reason for this.)
Its also a significant problem if you want to find a particular file,
you have to manually search through many DVD discs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We now use 1TB drives for backup at our workplace. Each replaces
approximately 250 DVDs.
The cost is now competitive too
1000G drive = $100 Approximately
1000g of good brand (ie verbatim etc) DVD @ $30/50 = $150
(note - im talking local prices here, it might vary in other
countries)
For 30% more than the cost of blank DVD, you can have 2x identical 1
TB drives, and therefore redundancy in case
of a drive failure. Keeping these in separate locations is recommended
in case of fire, theft etc.
The labour costs involved are miniscule compared to the DVD method.
Encryption (of your choice) is also an option.
On DVD encryption or RAR is a risk, as if a small part of the disc is
damaged, you can't recover any of the data. if you put the unencrypted
files on there, there is an excellent chance you will recover at least
some of them. If identical DVD copies are damaged, its unlikely they
will be damaged in exactly the same place, so you have a good chance
of getting everything. if both are encrypted, compressed and are both
damaged, there isn't much chance.
Finally, if you are backing up large things like movies, you will
always end up with files or groups of files that are "not quite big
enough" to fit an entire DVD and on most DVD's you will end up with a
few hundred MB of "wasted space" on a DVD where you can't fit another
of the same data size. This doesn't happen as much with hard drives.
.
- References:
- DVDs vs external Hard Drives
- From: Ron Cliborn
- DVDs vs external Hard Drives
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