David Polanco San Antonio Technology Blog

mdeleon Says:
May 01st, 2009

I keep periodic backups of my Aperture library on dvds, put them in an antistatic case and put them in my filing cabinet with months and year written in marker on the front of the dvd. I think I really need to invest in some of those gold archival dvd's because the one's I have are pretty cheap, however as I've told you before, it's not my only backup. I also keep incremental backups of my home folder on Amazon S3, maybe once a month. I have a monthly clone sitting on a partition of a 500gb external drive with the other half used for time machine. If all else fails, I keep my laptop and desktop synced with chronosync so I can always migrate. I'm really thinking of getting something like a drobo, hp media vault or setting up a raid so I can have my backups mirrored. You can never be too safe with your data, and it only took one hard drive dying for me to realize that.

anonymous Says:
May 02nd, 2009

i use gmail and cd's for the few bits that are my current work. Anything else I try to contain in hardcopy format and if my stuff dies on me, I can say, oh I'll just get the stuff I'm working on from gmail (mostly codes and office files) and good riddance to a lot of stuff that was never indexed properly on my disk

anonymous Says:
June 01st, 2009

My working setup is a laptop with a 160gb drive and an external 320gb WD Passport drive. I use the internal drive for documents and the external one for large media files. For backup, I have bought an additional 500gb Passport, which is large enough to hold ALL the data from the other two drives, without any need for compression or awkward backup software. I just erase the backup drive about once a week and copy in all the files from my working drives. I also sometimes copy a few files over during the week, when I feel I have made some important changes that I can't afford to lose.

As for your original question, "why trust HDs over DVDs", you are right--everone SHOULD know the answer: optical media have a mean storage life of at most several years. For the cheapest, generic DVDs, it's less than two years! Even if you keep two backups around, you are running a high risk that both of them will be bad by the time you need to use them. HDs' give you something on the order of 15-30 years of storage life, and we all know that in 15-30 years we won't be using the same disk anyway. Besides, a) it is much easier and faster to do frequent backups on an HD than on a DVD, and b) when dealing with a lot of media files, such as videos, you'd need a freakish amount of DVDs, not to speak of the time it requires to burn them.

With the price of 500gb portable externals around $100, there is just no reason to dick around with DVDs anymore.