Topic: archiving your recordings?

[F.O.Bean]

I trust verbatim DVDRs! I've been strictly using verbatim DVDRs/cdrs since like 1998. I haven't had any problems since tho. Stay away from memorex/Sony/etc.....

[emcdos]

I usually keep 2 copies in 2 external 2.5 HDDs (Toshiba HDD preferred), which I find very handy..., and although I plan to go for 3 copies in the future, lately I tend to keep as well the master recording of my most important and beloved shows in the SD/MicroSD card where they were recorded, of course, considering that SD/MircroSD cards are becoming more and more cheaper....
Other option which I would consider is keeping them in HI-MDs... well, whatever instead of DVD-R´s due to my bad experiences...

[scb]

so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R?  Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.

Don't rely on dvd-r.  I have discs from just a few years ago that are unreadable (Bean - some are Verbatim).

[F.O.Bean]

so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R?  Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.

Don't rely on dvd-r.  I have discs from just a few years ago that are unreadable (Bean - some are Verbatim).

thats why i burn 4 copies w nero express

[F.O.Bean]

it would be unrealistic for me to keep everything on hdds. i would prob need 4tb every year just for 1 copy of all 4 of my folders, not to mention for everything since 97 i recorded

[adrianf74]

I've lost way more DVD's over the years than I care to count.  These were high quality Verbatim, TY, etc. and none of the "garbage quality" stuff.  I know Hard Drive formats change with the times but right now, I've got a 3TB drive "online" which has all my music plus two copies of the files on separate portable hard drives.   They're both currently USB 3.0 as well.  They do the trick and at least I know my important data isn't going to be lost.

[F.O.Bean]

what program did u burn em with?

[adrianf74]

what program did u burn em with?

Nero.  And _ALWAYS_ at the slowest speed possible.  I've lost actual DVD's with content I've produced over the years as well as data discs.  When I started moving the content to hard drives about four years back -- from discs that were stored in a temperature controlled environment in a cake packs (in a box) -- about 25-30% of them had read errors.  Some of them were readable on different drives (in some cases, I had to try six or seven different computers at work) but in about 5% of the cases, there were parts that were completely unreadable so the content had to be reacquired or "given up on."

Suffice to say, I'll stick with hard drives going forward (and have for the last four years).  I've had a few drives even signal an "early death" via SMART, however, I was able to recover all of the data except for _ONE_ file which I had backed up elsewhere, anyhow. 

[Brian Skalinder]

it would be unrealistic for me to keep everything on hdds. i would prob need 4tb every year just for 1 copy of all 4 of my folders, not to mention for everything since 97 i recorded

You could cut your backups by a little less than half by including only...

2: flac 24 uncut recording -- you may extract your 24-bit uncut WAV from the FLAC
3: flac24 tracked DVDs -- you could derived your 16-bit version simply by dithering

...or better yet more than half by...

FLAC uncut recording + cue sheet + notes on basic post-processing like normalizing and compression

'Course, that doesn't get into what you mean by "tracked" and whether that includes any post-processing.  If it's truly just tracking (or just normalizing or even basic compression across the entire file) -- without any heavy post-processing -- you could simply store the original 24-bit FLAC or WAV + a cue sheet + brief notes on the normalizing / compression you applied.  This is what I do for most of my recordings...unless I do heavy post-processing, in which case I'll keep the original + cue sheet / notes + a 24- or 16-bit rendered copy.

[crossthreaded]

Had to check the date on this thread to make sure it wasn't from 10 years ago.

why would you make 'archival' backups to a media that degrades over time?  That is the antithesis of archiving.

redundant backups at home and another I keep in my safe deposit box.

hd's are cheap,  and just slightly more convenient than burning dvd's.

You guys still use zip discs as well?

[yousef]

My maths might be a bit off but here in the UK a spindle of 100 Verbatim DVDs cost £20 - so that's just less than 500GB for £20.

A 2TB external drive costs less than £70 - so it's quicker, cheaper, smaller and arguably more reliable.

I can see the attraction in having something physical live a DVD as a back-up and can understand not wanting to put all one's eggs in one basket as it were but still...

[DSatz]

adrianf, most CD and DVD recorders produce discs with the lowest rate of subsequent read errors when they're operated toward the faster end of their available speed range, not the slower end.

I'm hedging that statement only because I'm sure I haven't read every test that's ever been made. But in the several professionally conducted comparative tests that I have read since higher-speed drives first became available (I was in the business when CD-Rs were introduced, recorders ran strictly at 1x speed and cost ~$5,000 in 1980s dollars, and blank discs cost $75 apiece), that has always been the result. And I have to admit that I don't know exactly why it's true; I could guess, but I'm not gonna.

--So far in this discussion, I feel that the people who back their recordings up on multiple hard drives have many good points in their favor, provided that they don't run those drives continually, and provided that they copy the contents over to new hard drives in a cycle such as "every four years" or something like that. I'm not personally going to go there, but their points are good, and many professionals would agree with their choice of strategy.

I really can't agree with the idea of using FLAC, though. That just increases the density of the stored material--if/when a sector goes bad, you'll lose that much more of your material. Hard drives today do a lot of internal error correction because their areal density has been pushed so very, very high for (basically) economic reasons. But you can't see that error correction occurring since it's all internal to the drive's electronics. Then suddenly you get an avalanche.

--best regards

[F.O.Bean]

Dsatz, I burn all of my DVDRs at 16x. Regardless, I'll still continue to use verbatim DVDRs.  Having  10. 2 tb exhdda isnt realistic for me. Burning multiple DVDRs is. Period !

[robeti]

This is my current back up situation:

For audio:
raw 24/48 unaltered masters
edited flac tracks 24/48 + info
 
Both on two different external HDD at the same location.
I'm looking for a third HDD to place at a different location.

I do full HD video too:
raw sd card master copied to HDD
edited MKV in best possible quality.
I also keep the software cue sheets so editing is always possible in the future.

Again, both on two different HDD.

Sometimes, when I shoot video and do audio a concert archived this way takes up 50 GB.

 

[sparko]

Well, I don't have that many recordings I made (just one...) but I've been a concert photographer for 8 years now and RAW files from a DSLR (not the JPG) are comparable huge to JPGs. I have an external drive with all my photos on and every now and then copy the raw files to DVD RAM, not DVDR. Still, I never lost any of my burned Verbatim DVDR, which I mostly burn at mid speed or highest speed, not slowest. It's slow enough to copy files to DVD RAM which are only available in 3/5x and the 3x are WAY cheaper. You can do the math how long it would take to backup more than 300GB photos burning at slowest speed. There's only one set of photos I do have three copies of: 1 on an internal drive, and one on each of my portable drives (of which one is just a small pocket drive to take on the road).

I don't have the money to buy more backup drives right now. Additionally, all drive slots in my desktop are used and all the drives are almost full (total of 6.5TB) but I have to say, in way more than 10 years, none of my drives ever died. And actually all I know of that still exist, they are still working. I'm honest - I'm lazy and maybe should spend more time, care and money onto backup solutions. But tho all of this is great memory (photos, recordings and such) - in the end it's all just 0s and 1s, bits and bytes. It's not the actual memory and to erase THIS it takes way more than a power fail or a dying pack of technology

I'm actually feeling quite uncomfortable with external drives to be honest. Cuz the life time of a harddrive is never how long they run but how often they get started and stopped. My desktop pc's ever since have been running 24/7 when I'm at home (so they in the end get starts and stops maybe 10 times a year). So none of my harddrives ever will reach the 10,000 starts and stops they are averagely designed for. An external drive always gets started and stopped way more often. So that actually might die a lot sooner.
Actually backups are quite complicated if you can't buy as many drives as you want. I'd love to have one or two NAS storages, but tho I know they do have great prices for what they offer, it's just out of question for my budget. So I currently stick with getting DVD RAM when they are on sale.

Call me naive but I would actually never do all the effort in doing 3 or 4 copies and store them somewhere else or even in a safe box somewhere. I don't think that me and my tiny little stuff I do might be of any interest for upcoming generations so that I would need to store them that good. Maybe even I don't care for these things in like 30 years....