There is no digital media that is foolproof, especially by burning.
I am having RAMPANT failures on mutiple brands of both CDRs and DVDRs that have been burned 5 or less years ago. It was NOT my burner either because the brands are inconsitently failing, as are the burns. By rampant, I mean maybe one failed disc in 30 or so that is no longer readable. To me that's WAY too high a percentage of data loss.
I VERY MUCH distrust burning discs as a result...not to mention that they're a PITA to catalog, store, and they take forever to burn a large amount of data.
I totally agree with whoever said that the way to go is to mirror harddrives. This is how the best systems are backed up at most workplaces work, so why wouldn't you do the same thing at home?
Basically, I have everything backed up onto several redundant HDs. If I start having HD problems on a drive, no matter if it's a cheap-ass drive or the most expensive drive money can buy, I have peace of mind knowing that all of my master recordings are backed up somewhere else.
If you're really anal, store the backed up drives in an alternate location so there can be no common mode catastrophic failures, like fire or power surges. Then once a month or so, re-mirror the drives.
1TB drives are $100 now and it takes less than 8 hours to mirror the full 1TB...it would probably take 40 or 50 hours to burn that much data onto DVD.
Personnally, I don't really care if they're the cheap-ass drives or not because since I have five drives under my desk, as soon as I start seeing one of the drives having problems a) I know I already have the data backed up on a second drive and, b) it's time to start backing up the second source because the first source is about to take a dump! c) once I mirror the drive, I've now got the data in 3 places and I could care less if the first drive fails (other than the fact that it cost $100 to replace the drive.)
Topic: Western Digital " My Book" issues (Read 4484 times)