I've accumulated thousand of pictures over the last few years from the pay sites that I have been a member of. I currently have the pics stored on regular Maxell CD-R's and they work quite well. But I was wondering if there is a disc maker that is of high quality that is made specifically for long term storage of pictures. I don't want all the money that I spent on subscription fees to go down the toilet because the discs I have saved my pictures on won't read anymore. I've heard Verbatim's are good, but are they are made with music files in mind, aren't they? I'm looking for something that specializes in long term storage of picture files. Any info would be appreciated.
You may want to consider storing your pics in a parity archive. This allows you to recover the images using a mathematical process if part of the disk becomes corrupt.
I have tried QuickPar and it works very well to recover missing data.
I'm not an expert on disk life, but I have heard of a few things:
(1) It is claimed that disks using a gold media layer instead of aluminium are more resistant to corrosion.
(2) Some companies sell CD-R disks that they claim are "archive quality". These usually cost more.
(3) Some people claim that burning the CD at low speed will give you a longer storage life.
I am not sure how valid any of these three options are. Perhaps others in this forum might comment.
Personally I wouldn't place any faith in any storage media that claims to be "long term" quality for archiving. My approach is to use good enough quality discs to store my files, then every 2 or 3 years I transfer them onto a new set of discs. So I don't tend to worry about long-term shelflife of discs, so long as it's at least a few years.
Who knows what kind of unforseen quality problems will crop up in 5 years. Look at those Evil Angel DVD discs - unreadable after a few years. The manufacturer could have claimed as many guarantees as they like at the time, but all that matters is that now the discs are not readable.
Regarding file types, I cannot see how the manufacturers would make any distinction about what files you are storing. Pictures or music or whatever, it is all just data, and the discs don't "know" or care what the data represents.
go and buy a 20GB hard drive and store everything on it. make sure you run it a couple of times a month so the platters dont lock. at least thats what I did with all my pictures. about 8gb worth :p
you should add a RAID Controller, though otherwise a risky single disk failure scenario might be your nightmare. No redundancy with such a configuration! If one disk fails, everything will be lost. Okay, there are some companies that could help restoring your data, but that´s quite an expensive business!
A much better backup strategy might be using always the current DVD technology. So, if a new media format is available copy over your data towards the new media.
IMHO DLT tape drives were not a bad idea either for backup purposes, because the durability of this media is quite amazing! Check this Whitepaper
The Super DLTtape™ and DLTtape™ cartridges and their media have been designed for superior performance with their various drives and libraries, providing maximum reliability and durability. With an archive life of up to 30 years and tape passes that can exceed 1 million passes, the DLTtape media is the ideal solution for your storage needs.
The (smart) sysadmin's mantra: if it's worth backing up, it's worth backing up twice.
What happens if the next time you run your drive and it fails. Disk stiction isn't the only thing that can take out a drive and not all failures are gradual.
Note that the RAID array will protect against a single-disk failure, but controller chips and cables go bad too. A bad controller chip will write corrupted data on all disks. Sure, the chances are pretty low, but pros will use multiple disk arrays on different controllers and mirror. And still use tape backups. Daily, with offsite storage.
If a burst water pipe floods your server room, then you might have data that is one day old from your offsite backup tape. If you counted on having your fancy RAID array save your ass, well, you will be looking for a new job.
Of course, porno pix might not merit such extreme backup techniques, but it's up to M.B. to assess the risks.
Amusingly, I do exactly what CJNeverWinter suggests, but if the drive dies tomorrow, all of my critical files (browser bookmarks, mail, Quicken datafile, etc.) are on a small CD-RW. I rotate through a few so the last backup is usually about 10 days old.
However, I have no illusions that my external disk is an archival solution.
No, my comments about RAID arrays were a followup to Stemcell's recommendation for them.
Disk drives are good storage devices which provide convenient read-write access; RAID arrays are great storage devices. Neither qualifies as an archival backup.
RAID arrays address downtime due to disk failure and increase performance (depending on usage). However, not one Oracle DBA on this planet worth his salt would consider a RAID array a backup solution.
Considering the price of DVD writers and DVD-R media, that's really the best consumer-grade archival solution at this time. CD writers and CD-R media are the second choice. Tape backup is still pretty expensive and let's face it, the CD format is more convenient to a home user than tape.
What I have is CD-R's that are sorted by website. I do one month subscriptions once or twice a year from about 6-10 sites and save as much as I can in that one month. Everytime I add more pics to a disc I will usually store everything on a new disc. So basically what I'm doing is transferring pics on a new discs every year or two. I am definitely going to store on discs not hard drives, so...what is universally considered the best disc to store my pics on? Maxell, Verbatim etc.
Most people agree Taiyo-Yuden blank CD-Rs from Japan are the best. They market them now under their own name and also manufacture them for others as well. Usually if the packaging says "Made in Japan" they are TY. In the past, Fuji and TDK used TY and the containers used to have screw top caps on top. Not sure if that is still the case however. The cost was never more than shady discs if you caught a sale.
