Hi voltronic,
So you check your media annually and by what methods?
Um... I put them in the computer and see if they read? I don't get involved with MD5 hashes if that's what you're getting at. Honestly the annual check hasn't been a planned housekeeping task, it's just sort of happened the last several years as I have upgrade my computer from CD to DVD and now BD drives, re-copying media to the hard drives and then to the newer optical discs along the way. Intermediately, I have also purchased new internal and external hard drives, and/or changed the partitioning on my system and media drives. Each time that happened, I would go through my optical media backups and either copy those files again to the media drive and/or update tags and such from what is already on said hard drive, then burn those to new optical media. Whenever I get new music files (or anything else I care deeply about), I keep a log of what is not backed up to optical and then when I accumulate enough to fill a disc I burn those new files. Nightly mirrored backups are still taking place on the hard drives.
I worked for several years as a computer repair tech, and I have seen too many random hard drive failures to trust mechanical drives as the only form of critical data backup. S.M.A.R.T. will sometimes give you a heads up things are going bad, but other times shit just happens and you've got bad sectors or something worse happens without warning. Or maybe you're a klutz and drop your external drive. If your drive fails containing critical files you have no other backup of, then you're spending major $$$ for a company like Ontrack to recover them for you.
I also fully acknowledge my hypocrisy here by not having off-site backups. I won't use the online backup solutions simply because I flat out don't trust them from a privacy standpoint. What I'm planning to do is have a hard drive and cache of optical media in a safety deposit box or something similar.
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Well putting the disc in the computer to see if it reads is good but if that disc doesn't read next week, you may not know for 51 weeks and if it's your only copy, you're SOL. An md5 or sha1 hash is good to know if it's the same fingerprint, but it still won't do any good if you've verified that you can't read the disc. Do you have any recommendations on how to store your optical media? In theory, we should all have our media is perfectly controlled rooms sealed off from that dust and dirt that we collect but unfortunately, at least for me, that's not really possible right now.
I get what you're saying about HDD and mechanical drives but optical media can't be made out to be the solution to all our problems. Hell in a few years more, we may not be able to buy new CDROM drives or DVD drives. Yes, I know it will probably be longer than that but just take a look at this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_drive#Other_sizes The floppy disk was introduced in 1971 and I don't know of a practical purpose for a single floppy disk, even the ones that store 200MB.
In my opinion, if you're going to store data on HDD, it should be stored in a zfs.
I understand not trusting online backup solutions but there are good ones out there. My favorite is tarsnap:
http://www.tarsnap.com/ the client code is all open source. More on tarsnap:
https://www.tarsnap.com/security.htmlhttps://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.htmlGranted, you probably won't want to shove your flac/wave recordings up there since that would use much disk space and really not worth it when you have places like LMA.
I have a feeling more and more companies are going to struggle with good, reliable storage solutions as time progresses and the need/want to keep everything increases.