Re: How to digitize precious photos?

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 14:57:35 GMT, Joseph Meehan wrote:

> My personal business experience has shown that name brand, not
> cheap floppies have poor reliability. I would not trust them. I worked
> in a must do, can't fail environment so we have multiple layers of back
> up, including off site and out of state locations. I keep at least three
> copies of any important data. My experience proved that I was, if
> anything, underestimating the problem and under reacting to the
> problem.

Not all name brand floppies were of the highest quality. If you
don't trust any of them, it's certainly wise to keep multiple
backups and use off-site storage. But your experience is at odds
with mine. I'm not saying that I've never had a floppy exhibiting
data errors, but with the ones I've considered to be important
enough to use high quality disks, using verification after creation,
and storing them in a reasonable manner, I haven't had *any* errors.
That's not to say I never will, but it hasn't happened yet. If the
reported "15% error rate" is even remotely typical, my results
should be extremely unlikely.

BTW, I still recall some of the details about how I made the Win95
backup disks. The plastic cabinets I bought to store them in were
probably purchased in J&R, were AT&T brand, and contained several
boxes of AT&T branded floppy discs. Those discs found other duties,
and only Dysan disks were used, since they had the reputation for
being highly reliable. I've also found Fuji and some of Maxell's
disks to be reliable, unlike Verbatim and some other brands.

In any case, while it's wise to have multiple backup copies, with
some stored offsite (I've done that with business backup tapes too),
it certainly wouldn't be cost effective or even wise to keep less
critical or valuable data such as a personal copy of Windows install
disks stored off-site. The company I'd previously used to send
weekly pouches of backup tapes to was better than most. Tapes could
only be returned on request by, and delivered to a small number of
authorized personnel whose signatures were on file. I don't recall
the name of the company, but they stored the backups in vaults
located in or under the lowest levels of the World Trade Towers. So
much for reasonable precautions. There are no guarantees, and
perfect protection doesn't exist.

.