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Offline DSatz

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #60 on: June 18, 2020, 10:14:10 PM »
voltronic, I do have further plans, and I certainly understand that spindle drives have a limited service life--plus ten or twenty years from now there may be no such thing as USB any more, at least in the form that we know it now.

Thanks for your concern, though--and I mean that 100%.

--I wanted to post one further note. I've kept a lot of my discs in the "beehives" that many of the blanks came in, but I've also put a lot of them into loose-leaf notebooks of the kind shown in the photo below. The only thing was, when I started using these, if I fished a disc out of a compartment, the flap had a tendency to cut my fingers. So to avoid that, I started putting the discs into the pockets on top of the flaps as shown on the left-hand side of the photo.

Unfortunately, over time (between 5 and 15 years, depending), some chemical in the flaps interferes with the coating layer on the disc. Much of it can be cleaned off, but some of it can't, and it's causing read errors on some of the discs at that point. So again, this is just a product that turns out not to have been so good in the long run.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2020, 11:14:50 PM by DSatz »
music > microphones > a recorder of some sort

Offline voltronic

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #61 on: June 19, 2020, 06:41:31 AM »
I store my BD-R discs in individual sleeves somewhat like those in your 3-ring binder, but they have no top flap.  Only the woven fabric contacts the disc surface.

I suppose the safest storage option is something that does not contact the disc surface at all, but I have broken more plastic jewel cases than I can count.  I have hundreds of audio CDs in their original cases, but I am very careful with them - the plastic seems to break if you look at it the wrong way.

This is another option I used to buy.  The plastic is slightly flexible and semi-opaque.  It feels like the stuff used for Schoeps storage tubes.
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Offline heathen

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #62 on: June 19, 2020, 01:15:28 PM »
My Drobo 5n just decided to stop working. It has everything I've taped in 10 years on it. The "advice" I got for out-of-warrantee tech support is, essentially, buy a new one, put the drives in and hope it doesn't erase them. So make sure you have a lot of multiple backups!

Friendly reminder about RAID and backups... http://www.petemarovichimages.com/2013/11/24/never-use-a-raid-as-your-backup-system/
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Offline perks

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #63 on: June 19, 2020, 02:55:32 PM »
I use paper envelopes with a glue-less flap that can be closed to store my archival copy DVD's. The envelope is made from paper that I have to assume was bleached to achieve that clean appearance. The envelopes also have a cellophane type of plastic window that enables me to read the identifying information I have written onto the clear plastic center of the DVD.

While I have yet to have any archival DVD's fail is there some risk that I'm not considering?  For example will the chlorinated chemicals on the envelope and the chemicals used on the writing surface back of the DVD start to interact over time resulting in a loss of data? I have roughly 1500 archival DVD's so  an oversight or a lack of understanding on my part could be catastrophic to my backup plan. I do use other methods to back this same data up. The data files on a DVD was the one approach that I considered the safest bet to keep my data safe but this thread has me wondering if I'm relying on  method that is known to fail.
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Offline jb63

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #64 on: June 19, 2020, 04:51:12 PM »

Friendly reminder about RAID and backups... http://www.petemarovichimages.com/2013/11/24/never-use-a-raid-as-your-backup-system/

this is the smartest thing I've ever read. It more than QUADRUPLES the cost of maintaining this stuff and I am pretty sure taping and archiving, esp. in 24/96, is a really expensive task.
once again, lost in all the noise

Offline voltronic

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #65 on: June 20, 2020, 07:40:09 AM »

Friendly reminder about RAID and backups... http://www.petemarovichimages.com/2013/11/24/never-use-a-raid-as-your-backup-system/

this is the smartest thing I've ever read. It more than QUADRUPLES the cost of maintaining this stuff and I am pretty sure taping and archiving, esp. in 24/96, is a really expensive task.

Yeah, this is why I almost invested in a separate RAID setup, but never really went for it.  It's an expensive addition for not much more peace of mind.

I haven't done it, but offsite backup is really the way to go in case of catastrophic failure.  I set up a family member who doesn't know how to run local backups with Backblaze, and that works well.
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Offline WiFiJeff

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #66 on: June 20, 2020, 12:03:34 PM »
I have been using EAC in "Secure" mode and wondering whether just ripping in much faster "Burst" mode would suffice.  It won't, for me at least.

Mostly if there are errors shown in secure mode they clear up if I use another drive to rip the problem tracks.  In several cases this did not help, but doing a burst mode rip produced a file that played fine, I examine these burst mode tracks in iZotope to spot issues.  But recently in some 2006 material I found two CDs with bad digi-glitch problems over four or five tracks that would not rip in secure mode but ripped in burst mode with only a "sync error" warning.  I suspected perhaps equipment issues in the original recording, but...  I had sent backups of these to a friend overseas (when postage was still reasonable for that), he ripped FLACs and sent them to me, they are perfectly fine.  His copies were on fancy printed CD blanks (I was into photos as well as program listings) while my "masters" were on unprinted CDs with only Sharpie writing.  The fancy printed CDs were all cloned from these now problematic masters.

I am now wondering whether "Secure" mode does in fact guarantee the files are good-as-new.

As if Covid were not making us all paranoid enough!

Jeff

Offline DSatz

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #67 on: June 21, 2020, 12:26:43 AM »
WiFiJeff, the CD medium was invented for audio, and the CD-ROM format was built "on top of that". The audio CD format was designed to tolerate a certain amount of read errors. Audio CD players not only have error correction, but where that isn't possible, they go into error concealment modes (sample value interpolation or in extreme cases, sample value "holding") that generally fool most people's ears most of the time, and if the damage is so great that even error concealment can't be applied, they mute for a few milliseconds and go on.

But error concealment (which falsifies the data) is unacceptable for CD-ROM data retrieval; a single wrong bit in an executable file (if the CD-ROM was a software distribution disc) could crash the user's computer. So the CD-ROM format was designed with a considerable amount of additional, redundant data so that (a) even moderately severe disc damage still wouldn't cause any read errors, but just as importantly (b) the system would never allow a read error to "slip through" unnoticed--the hardware would always report such errors as failures. That way, incorrect data would never be read from the disc under the mistaken impression that it was correct data.

(By "never" I mean, with such a low probability that the odds were, it would never happen in many thousands of years with many, many users--although it's not completely, 100.00000000000% impossible; it would, however, require coincidences that are nearly unthinkable, like the same person winning the lottery jackpot every day for several months running type of thing.)

Anyway my point is, if you record .wav or flac files AS FILES rather than as audio tracks, the reliability of the system increases enormously--for all practical purposes, if you're able to read the files from the CD, you've got the right information. Whereas with audio discs there is a certain looseness, because it's well known that the ear is rather easily fooled up to a point. For example, in the cases where I had made two or three audio discs from the same set of WAV source files, sometimes EAC would extract the same wav files from some tracks on multiple discs, but not other tracks from the same discs. It has been rare that two audio CDs, both made from the same set of WAV files on the same recorder on the same day, have extracted exactly the same--even though EAC reports no errors, and if I extract the same tracks multiple times from either CD alone, I get consistent results for each disc--just not the same results from all (or both) the discs.

Moral of the story is, from an accuracy standpoint, audio CDs aren't as good for long-term storage as data CDs (or data DVD-Rs) that contain your wave audio as data, whether as uncompressed linear PCM or as FLAC files.

My apologies if you already knew all this stuff, but it's been a long time since it was new information that had to be thoroughly discussed, and I don't know whether you were around back then (1980s) or not.

--best regards
« Last Edit: June 21, 2020, 01:57:50 PM by DSatz »
music > microphones > a recorder of some sort

Offline WiFiJeff

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #68 on: June 21, 2020, 02:11:46 AM »
I started recording on DAT in 1999 (my experience with computer files goes back to programming FORTRAN on punch cards when a computer was a large building).  I started burning audio CDs because most people I know did not have DAT players, and I kept mostly making audio CDs as finished product until a late switch to archiving high resolution iZotoped files in 2015.  When I left DAT for the Edirol R1 in 2005 (then Sony D1,  D50, Sonosax Mini R82, reverting to Tascam DR 2D and DPA MMA-A when security got tighter), I also archived raw files, but re-editing these from DVD is way too daunting a project.  So I am going back to the CD audio files 1999-2014 and ripping the audio files to hard drive.  I have also archived (2015- now) finished (iZotope processed) high resolution files to BluRay storage, I used iZotope from 2009 on but stupidly did not archive the high resolution files right away.

I am saving the ripped stuff to three copies on USB hard drives (5 TB).  I do not intend to burn BluRay discs of this older stuff, but I guess it wouldn't be hard to add that kind of backup once the project is finished. 

Anyway, the number of problem CDs back to 2006 so far is manageable, but not zero.  I just hope the more primitive CDs from earlier don't give greater problems.  The bad errors I have gotten have sounded often like digi-glitched recordings, EAC burst mode has read the CD but gotten a file with noises and drop-outs that my early clones of the CDs sent abroad do not have.  Even secure mode copies that finish but have reported errors are sometimes sounding okay but other times have digi-glitch sounding problems that were not originally there.  The older Truesound Audio CD burns are sometimes like this as well; they played when new, then the bits melted away.  Some very old ones are seen as blank, others have some tracks blank, others that play like noisy hell.  None of mine so far that rotten.


Jeff

Offline DSatz

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #69 on: June 25, 2020, 08:22:56 PM »
Continuing, and quite possibly concluding, my travelog: I am very nearly done transferring all the discs from the further caches that I'd squirreled away. I have again had problems with dual-layer discs, including four BD-Rs (total threatened loss, up to 46.6 GB per disc!).

But here's the thing I'd like to advise people (besides not entrusting ANY further data to ANY such discs): If you put a disc into the drive and the drive starts acting as if it's a blank disc, but you know that you've recorded on it and finalized the recording, wipe the disc off as well as you can and try again--several times if necessary. Eventually I was able to read and copy the data from all four discs, but not until I had passed through the valley of despair about them.

--best regards

[edited later to add this P.S.:] At least with the drive I'm using and Windows 10, the access pattern with dual-layer BD-Rs (Blu-Ray discs) makes them EXTREMELY slow when a large number of small files has to be copied from them. I'm currently copying a disc of archived work data that has hundreds of thousands of files on it including many that are just a few KB; I started it around 10 last night, left it running while I slept, and now twelve hours later it's still not done. "Time remaining" discouragingly says "More than 1 day", but I think that's because it's currently in the middle of several thousand small files, and has no way to know the mix of file sizes that remain (unless it were to average them ...).
« Last Edit: July 01, 2020, 10:38:37 AM by DSatz »
music > microphones > a recorder of some sort

Offline jb63

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #70 on: June 26, 2020, 12:25:20 PM »
I'm still in the valley of despair level. On top of all the other stuff, today my DAT machines-- BOTH of them just started reading nothing but errors.
once again, lost in all the noise

Offline morst

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #71 on: June 27, 2020, 02:44:29 PM »
--I wanted to post one further note. I've kept a lot of my discs in the "beehives" that many of the blanks came in, but I've also put a lot of them into loose-leaf notebooks of the kind shown in the photo below.
I never trusted those notebooks for anything important.
Always seemed like a scratch vector short term, and potential chemical interaction or adhesion issue long term.
Keeping them on the "Beehive" spindles is great, because the hubs of CDs and DVDs are just a bit thicker than the data part, so they don't scrape or stick.
I tried to keep the cd-sized round label paper from the top, so I could flip it over and label the spindle with year and month range of contents.
Worked great for my DVD backups from about 2003-2006, which now reside on hard drives again.


Friendly reminder about RAID and backups... http://www.petemarovichimages.com/2013/11/24/never-use-a-raid-as-your-backup-system/

Very true. RAID is fantastic if it's worth paying for power and wear-and-tear to have constant and rapid availability of data.
But each RAID array must be treated as a single device in terms of backup and archiving strategy.
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Offline DSatz

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #72 on: July 01, 2020, 11:03:38 AM »
jb63, have you tried again since your last posting, and how's it going if so?

I've also fetched all my DAT recordings out of storage, and find that I need to transfer some of them that I missed before (or whose transfers I've misplaced somehow)--and nothing is working yet for me, either. I have two good DAT decks, both Sonys, one of which (a DTC-75ES) apparently stopped working while it spent two years in storage; I'm currently looking for a place to get it repaired. Apparently the problem that it has is common with the group of Sony models that use that same transport control system. My other good deck (a TCD-D10 Pro) is working well, but it has a proprietary digital I/O connector--and Sony no longer makes the cables that fit it. I have the AES/EBU I/O cable for it, which seems to be OK, and my format converter lights up saying that it's receiving a valid signal from it. But the converter still isn't putting out an S/P-DIF signal that my R-44 can recognize, and I don't know why.

So that leaves the portables--TCD-D7 and TCD-D8, which have only half-size head drums, and so aren't nearly as reliable for playing back old tapes. Plus they have the same issue with proprietary digital I/O sockets. It will probably take more digging in my storage rooms and another day or so of futzing around before I can transfer anything. In the meantime, I fortunately have other things to do, so I'm not completely stalled.

I tend to have a "binary" approach to clean-up duties in general: Either I'm not dealing with it for long periods of time, or else I'm the demon who Must Not Be Stopped.
music > microphones > a recorder of some sort

Offline morst

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #73 on: July 01, 2020, 05:26:11 PM »
My other good deck (a TCD-D10 Pro) is working well, but it has a proprietary digital I/O connector--and Sony no longer makes the cables that fit it. I have the AES/EBU I/O cable for it, which seems to be OK, and my format converter lights up saying that it's receiving a valid signal from it. But the converter still isn't putting out an S/P-DIF signal that my R-44 can recognize, and I don't know why.
my D10ProII doesn't have a working head right now, so you can borrow my cables if you want. Let's see what I have handy... Well I have the AES ones here, like you already have.
Both of the rubberized strain relieves(?) at the XLR end of mine hve become very hard, and are now broken off into two rubbery cylinders around the 2 parts of the Y cable.
I can test it for pinout routing if you would like to conmpare, probably a good idea to at least test continuity on yours (and mine) before considering a replacement. I figure if you stick a VERY thin solid wire in the special connector, you can probe around until you figure out which XLR pin it connects with.
I own the Coaxial S/Pdif version too, but it's not sitting on my desk right now like the AES.
I also have the rather rare DCP-80 voltage converter which is shaped like the internal battery of the D10. It is needed in order to power the deck from external DC. I may have gotten the last one Sony had, in 1996, I suppose.


Sounds like your issue is getting the Edirol to sync though...
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Offline DSatz

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Re: fave cdr
« Reply #74 on: July 01, 2020, 06:15:36 PM »
morst, that's very kind of you. I have a working AC supply that also fits into position like a battery, which I'm using now. And in the meantime I was able to get a Canare transformer that steps the 110-Ohm AES/EBU output down to 75 Ohms unbalanced for use with the S/P-DIF input of my R-44. (Dale Pro Audio had it in stock, bless their hearts. Support your local pro audio dealers!) So as of five minutes ago I'm in business, subject to the rather considerable deterioration of these tapes.

It turned out that the first tape I tried to transfer must have been recorded via the analog inputs of a D7 or D8, because it's at 48 kHz. The R-44 wouldn't accept the input from the format converter only because I had set the R-44 to expect 44.1 kHz. It all seems so clear after one has figured things out ...

--best regards
music > microphones > a recorder of some sort

 

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