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I have multiple external drives which I cycle through so if one fails I have the previous backup set to fall back to.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I’ve used NAS units for my backup for 10-15 years now. Disks are RAID-ed and when one dies I just plop in another. Every once in while I have to copy the whole lot when I upgrade my NAS. Currently using a Synology 418 and I love it. Offsite backup for really valuable stuff on an external hard drive in a bank safety deposit box.
So far, I’ve lost only what I erased myself but there is no backup system that fully protects you from gits.
Mircea
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I am not sure, but I don't think that backing up to a NAS will protect you from Ransomware attacks. Ransomware will probably encrypt the NAS as well.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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True, but general hygiene practices (updated antivirus, a good firewall, common sense while browsing) have kept me safe from viruses and ransomware so far. Besides, I’m too small a fish to fry for a targeted attack. Offsite backup also helps.
Mircea
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Cp-Coder wrote: I don't think that backing up to a NAS will protect you from Ransomware attacks
If you can ensure that the credentials needed to access the NAS are different than the ones used for logging onto the potentially-infected machine(s), it shouldn't be a problem.
Not that I don't still prefer a completely offline backup. And then an offsite backup to the backup.
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Just curious if some of you ever considered cloud as offsite solution for critical data. What scares me about home solutions is that if the house/office gets damaged all data is lost forever 😱
Almost every cloud provider has a cheap price tier for archive (write once, access rarely). You benefit from top security, both physical (Geo redundant archives in data centers protected by military level security) and IT (encryption, best attack surveillance and best security experts in the world)
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Okay, I buy a LOT of USB devices. You can bulk buy them.
If your storage needs are that small. It's easy.
But simply get a MicroSD USB device. Buy the MicroSD cards you need. They take up NO SPACE.
I have clients who keep a few of their encrypted backups in the trunk of their vehicles. They
swap them out every friday. that is the "off-site" disaster recovery for a few dollars!
With a little effort you could make a 12hr fire rated block of drywall "safe" to keep them in.
They store nicely in the normal SD card holders, and are still small.
And WAY faster the DVD. [I get data delivered via DVD every month, and WISH they went to SD cards,
it's almost faster to DOWNLOAD than to access on the DVD, LOL]
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I disconnect the one backup drive when not in use. So. far, so good.
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There are a second kind of DVD (and blueray) disk called "M-Disk" where M stands for Millenium. They do require a specialized burner (which really burns them unlike the normal type). They can be read on any player.
M-DISC - Wikipedia[^]
I actually own such a burner - for archiving valuable photos, for example - but the problem falls back to the "ancient" problem of having any sort of suitable player down the line. I already have a problem with VHS tapes I want to digitize but have no working VHS player.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quote: I already have a problem with VHS tapes I want to digitize but have no working VHS player.
Yes! I have several VHS tapes that I want to burn to dvds, and I have a Toshiba VHS player that can copy VHS to DVD, but the stupid piece of cr*p committed suicide. I suspect it is in the power supply, and I have been planning to climb into the unit with a soldering iron to cut solid state fuzes out of the circuit and so force it to obey my commands, but haven't gotten so far yet.
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FANTASTIC! Thanks for posting this. You reminded me that I had a small stack of M-discs bought some years ago, that I couldn't use with my old DVD drives. So I tried it in my newer Dell desktop bought a year ago and the regular DVD drive that Dell shipped with the machine, does write to M-discs no problem. Go Dell!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Maybe you don't want to spend the $, but if you take your stuff to a shop that does VHS transfers to digital, they'll have the VHS machines.
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I've also struggled to write DVDs under W10.
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I currently favor UltraIso. I found it simple to use, but it won't work if your writer cannot write to an old DVD disc.
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To be fair, it was an external USB DVD writer as the laptop doesn't have a drive, so that could have been part of the problem as well as the cheap disc I used. I think I used ImgBurn (which used to work very well on W7. Also to note is that the installer may contain unwanted extras according to a post I saw).
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Have you checked the lifetime of your writer?
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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My writer is in a year old machine and has just about never been used.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I read somewhere that if you're DVD drive has power, it's writing/reading LEDs will be degrading with time. They'll eventually wear out and you'll not be able to read or write DVD's reliably. I've had a few old DVD drives that seemed to fail this way.
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My limited experience: I can still read CD-Rs I made in 1998, and have just tested one of the 100 DVD-Rs bought in 2011 (10p each on a spindle): burned fine at x16 using Imgburn, verified OK, now stored for posterity.
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In my experience it's not the age of the discs so much as it is the age of the DVD writer. We back up our source control and all of our product builds, so we write 500-800 discs a year. Most writers are only good for 200-300 discs before you start getting increasing write failure rates like you describe. My practice now is to replace the writer if it fails more than 1 disc in 10.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Interesting! But I write probably between 10 and 20 per year. So my writers should last many years. In any case, my desktop is barely a year old, so the writer should be OK.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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...or your drive is busted.
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Cp-Coder wrote: In the end I had to throttle down the write speed to the very minimum (2Mb/sec) before writing to the disc worked.
I'd be looking at that first.
Back when burning speeds quickly went from 1x to 2x, 4x, 8x etc I started running into problems if I tried to burn anything at more than 4x. I've always stuck with 4x out of sheer habit and very rarely run into read or write issues.
Of course I don't burn nearly as many discs today as I used to. But I still wouldn't even bother trying at anything higher than 4x. YMMV, of course, and as you've seen, it does.
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Cp-Coder wrote: From past experience I know that once you have successfully written a disc, it will remain readable for decades. But it seems if you want to write to a blank disc, it had better be less than about 4 years old?
You sure about that? Given writable DVD's have only been around for around 20 years, it would be impossible to state how good they are as a long term archival medium. They take guesses on durability of media by calculating how long media take to break down inside a worst case scenario type environment and then extrapolating that figure out for a normal storage environment. But unless you're keeping your DVD's in an environment that maintains the correct temperature and humidity you may find that the data isn't as safe as you thought.
Furthermore, do you test your original DVD backups from time to time and / or transfer them onto newer media? It's not uncommon for someone to think they are fine with their backups, to then go and restore them to find them in a less than perfect condition.
But don't just take my word on it -> https://www.naa.gov.au/information-management/store-and-preserve-information/preserving-information/preserving-cds-and-dvds
It states pretty bluntly that "CDs and DVDs are not suitable for long term archival use".
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Quote: CDs and DVDs are not suitable for long term archival use
This statement is incorrect when you are talking about M-discs. Recently I started using only M-discs.
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