Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

In terms of $ per GB what is actually cheaper? DVD-R or HDDs?

I don't know about your part of the world but used drives still offer pretty good results price wise. Been hoarding lots of drives this past two years. Was surprising a month after I had bought three 2TB drives for general storage at only $80 a pop then once month later to find the same drives selling for $150 then a few months later went up further to $230 each! 😳

Giggled a month ago when I bought a working 80GB maxtor ide drive for $1. 😎

In theory there was a problem last year due to the flooding in the area where most of the factories were located, causing a shortage in supply and thus higher prices, but I'm not sure if the effect of that was exaggerated.

GXL750 wrote:

I've never trusted CDs because they get damaged so easily. I remember reading some time ago that, at least with cheaper CDs, over time they degrade. I'm not sure if that's true but whatever the case, I've never done well with optical disc.

Well , years ago i rented games from the local library . Most of the discs were pretty badly scratched (some to the point you'd think someone rubbed them with fine sandpaper) yet of all the CD's i rented only 2 or 3 were damaged to the point that they were unusable .
When that happens you can still try to "fix" the discs by polishing them .

Then there is Disc rot LINK .
When the reflective layer starts to "rot" you are pretty much screwed , the only thing you can do is pray that you are able to recover the data , i've had 2 maybe 3 CD'd that had this and IIRC they all were low quality discs that were about a decade old .

as for DVD's and Blu-ray's i have no idea .

Oh right this topic was about backups 🤣

At the moment my backup strategy is a mess .
I have :
Asus n53jn laptop with 500GB drive (C: 116GB D:329GB +hidden recovery partition)
An older Western digital my book 500GB drive (one partition)
a new (2 months old) Lacie rikiki 1TB drive (partition1 801GB partition2 130)

Before i had the Lacie i backed-up my data to the WD drive , over time 500GB became too small so i bought the Lacie drive and moved a load of data to it .
About a month ago i re-installed windows and while i was at it i sorted out at least 8 years of data from at least 3 systems (lots and lots of double files and old junk) .
At the moment i have 240GB of data spread over the laptop D partition and the Lacie drive so i can easily back that up to the WD drive (until i hit 500GB again)
and i can't switch the Lacie (data)and the WD(backup) drives because i travel between 2 locations for which the WD drive (big and needs a adapter hooked up to the grid and uses USB 2.0) is not suited versus the Lacie (small is USB powered has USB 3.0 and has full aluminium case)

Solution get a 1.5TB (or bigger) external desktop model drive , the problem is the price tag

Well I got rid of all the CDs except for one set ... and that is note even a full set. I was going to throw those out, then I was going to keep them, then I was going to throw them out, then I spent two days scanning them before sanity finally started to prevail. They were good at one time ... when it was all we had. I have an external drive at work.... it gave me some perspective when I was able to load up all my DVD (not CD) data disks and sill only use 25% of the drive.....

I have quite a few CD-RWs which I use to burn the latest Ultimate DOS Boot CD and things like that. Windows 7 I now install purely from USB and all my games are digital.

In regards to backup it really is worth investing the time and money in something that does regular backups in the background. Windows 7 has this built-in or you can build a home server that backs up all your machines.

The time backups take s another issue. If you are stuck on USB 2.0 things are very slow. USB 3.0 and eSATA help heaps here. But if you copy from one disk to another it takes time shifting 1TB. And that's when incremental backups save lots of time...

Cloud storage is nice but once you have TBs of data they don't work very well. But as things are becoming more and more digital, backups become a lot more important.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

all my games are digital.
...
But as things are becoming more and more digital

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

🤣 ok fair enough 😀