Merry Christmas! I hope Santa has been good to everyone. I don't know who delivers presents for the Hanukkah kids or Kwanzaa folks but I hope they also were well blessed or gifted or whatever. I'm actually a Humanist myself so I just think of it all as the Winter Solstice, but it's a great time of year.
A few months ago I thought I'd look into putting my images onto BluRay disks. The burners are pretty reasonable so it seemed like a grand plan since they can hold 50GB per disk. So I started shopping at Newegg. Fortunately, before I bought anything I checked the price for blank disks. $50 EACH! Did you get that? Blank 50GB BluRay disks are FIFTY DOLLARS EACH! I found that quite unbelievable so I went to one of my Gurus at UCSB, Hank Rayner, and asked about it.
Yup, $50 per platter and not worth it. BluRay isn't yet about backup. It is about selling movies/videos for outrageous amounts so as to recover the research costs immediately! Same mentality of greed that wall street has. And it will end the same way, by lots of folks losing everything because they felt that they were entitled to suck huge amounts of money out of the economy for doing next to nothing. These disks couldn't cost more than a nickle to make! But it makes no difference to me since I won't be using them any time soon.
Turns out my DVD burner is double layer. That means I can burn about 8GB to a $2 dual layer DVD and then print it. The cost is about 1/6th of BluRay and DVDs stack up very compactly with numerous options for storage containers. I'm currently backing up 180,000 images, about 700GB, onto DVDs. It's slow. There are going to be quite a few of them. But if I lose one, I won't be losing 50GB of data to a coaster, it will only be 8GB. And I am making two of each, which should way improve my odds.
I am using Verbatim DataLifePlus Inkjet Printable DVD+R DL White, 2.4x P/N: 95123 disks. They got great ratings on Newegg. They work fine. They are slow. My computer doesn't mind slow. I don't mind slow as I can do other stuff while they burn. Where is the advantage to BluRay? As you can see, I'm not one to buy something solely because someone makes it and says it's the latest greatest. I don't have an iPhone either! I don't have a game console. But don't get me wrong, I have been in IT, mostly as a computer programmer, for over 30 years and I love technology. I just don't love it willy nilly and for no purpose. My computers are dual core, not quad core. But I do run RAID0, RAID1 and RAID5 disk arrays.
So, other things about backups: My friend Scott told me this week that he lost 20,000 images because he didn't have backups. He is all about backups now. But those 20,000 are lost forever. I am a bit compulsive about backups. I have not lost any images even though I have had numerous computer failures of different sorts. But backups are kinda like virginity, once you lose it there's no going back. As long as you got it you never really know what it's worth.
So, for Christmas I am giving you all the gift of knowledge. DO BACKUPS! You can do them to DVDs. You can do them to internal disks. You can do them to disks on other computers. You can do them to external USB drives. I am currently using two 1TB SeaGate FreeAgent Pro drives that support USB, SATA and eSATA and firewire. Software to manage the backups in many flavors are very inexpensive. I currently use SyncBackSE by www.2brightsparks.com which has most every option I could ever want for backups and they do continuous process improvement with a new update about every couple of months that covers all the new stuff that is available.
I have some more material in the pipeline and will likely be doing several posts over the holidays.
In the meantime, BE SAFE!
Dwight
No comments:
Post a Comment