[Gllug] Viable back-up solutions for gigabytes?

[adam at thebowery.co.uk]

On Sun, Sep 05, 2004 at 10:12:27AM +0100, Chris Bell wrote:

> retention. You need to read the spec before purchase, and hope that the
> system you choose is popular enough not to disappear as quickly as it
> appears, perhaps by choosing just single layer storage. There is already
> talk of using extreme blue lasers to read and write much higher densities,
> which may render current devices obsolete.

Are you suggesting I didn't read the specs before purchase? Dual layer DVD
burning seems to be as much of a spec that you are going to need, and it has
the advantage that your backups can be read in 80-90% of DVD drives (an item
you can go to the local PC World to buy off the shelf for under 50 quid) the
advantage of using DVD for backups is that it is here are now, my data is worth
far more than the 100 quid of the machine I purchased to back it up. A large
tape drive would have been luxurious, but then they are costly to run, and it
would have been a pain trying to recover my data after the house burnt down
with my tape drive in it (no popping over to PC World to buy a nice AIT-3 drive
on a Sunday afternoon).

*ANY* hardware you buy is going to be obsolete, or something else will just be
around the corner, when I purchased my DVD burner 18 months ago I knew
dual-layer discs were coming out within a year, I knew of Blu-ray coming out
"in the future", I knew the burner I bought would be 50 quid within 6 months 
etc. etc. but that didn't make any difference to me finding that I finally 
couldn't back things up to CD-r as the backups had finally got far too big. I 
needed a then and there system which would work.. 100 quid on a DVD burner that
would provide for my backup needs for a couple of years seems like a bargain to
me.

Adam
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