tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5434949928694456370.post2576666943087501693..comments2023-05-07T00:35:21.594-07:00Comments on The Transparent Hypnotist: Backing UpThe Transparent Hypnotisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02172984669014725628noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5434949928694456370.post-56946198356433590612007-09-29T13:26:00.000-07:002007-09-29T13:26:00.000-07:00Thanks for these comments. Good to see your side ...Thanks for these comments. Good to see your side of it.The Transparent Hypnotisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02172984669014725628noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5434949928694456370.post-73906448338333431992007-09-29T10:58:00.000-07:002007-09-29T10:58:00.000-07:00This is a long post, but I wanted to provide a tho...<I>This is a long post, but I wanted to provide a thorough answer, sorry!</I><BR/><BR/>There's zero truth to whatever rumors you've been hearing or were offered as fact about CD/DVD media. It works like this:<BR/><BR/>You get what you pay for.<BR/><BR/>If you see a sale at a local computer store for a 100 pack of CDs or DVDs of some kind, from some brand you've never heard of, and the price is ridiculously low - like $10 or so, and they even have a $6 mail in rebate on that bringing the final cost down to $4!!!<BR/><BR/>Well, there's a reason for that: it's called cheap products, and cheap media. But if you spend a little bit of money and get good quality media products, you end up with long-lasting and highly reliable media that keeps your data backed up safely for many years to come.<BR/><BR/>As someone that's been working with computers pretty much daily for the past 33 years of my life, here are my recommendations for CD/DVD blank recordable brands:<BR/><BR/>Verbatim, Sony, and TDK. I would not dare recommend any other brand of product, as the "cheap" stuff from companies like Memorex, GQ (Good Quality) or some other no-name brand will just have you wasting money and then on top of that loss you end up losing your data too.<BR/><BR/>I've got CDs on TDK media I burned in 1997 that are still readable - and I can always reburn the data to new media for a "fresh" burn if necessary. I've got some video recordings by Richard Bandler I backed up to TDK DVD media over 5 years ago; it's still there and I re-watch them on occasion, and I can re-burn those if I ever get the urge or get paranoid. :)<BR/><BR/>So, get good media and you're "safe" as you can be. I don't trust hard drives as long-term backup storage. I've seen entirely too many drives just die at random times, and with them they take tens if not hundreds of gigabytes of valuable information.<BR/><BR/>Look at it from this perspective: would you rather lose 350GB of movies, videos, pictures, and music and personally important data if the hard drive died in a split second, or would you rather have a single DVD get scratched and you lose no more than about 4.5GB of data?<BR/><BR/>Yes, the DVDs hold less data on an individual basis, but the very nature of that smaller capacity means <I>you lose less data if data is lost</I>.<BR/><BR/>To me, it's pretty obvious: take the lesser of the two evils. :) Online storage is ok for small stuff, and when it's free that's even better, but it's a negative in two respects: 1) someone else has access to your data unless you're doing some data encryption before the uploading (possible with some archiving software), and 2) it's slow as hell and takes a long time for the big files - if the transfer gets disconnected, you end up starting from scratch, etc.<BR/><BR/>It has its purposes, but for me, I'll take a DVD I just burned and verified the burn bit for bit over any other form of currently available storage solutions.<BR/><BR/>Have fun, always...<BR/>PaulAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com