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Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

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Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#31

Post by Fnoord »

enriquto wrote: post #21
shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

Once a year, before christmas, you chose about a hundred of the best photos, print them in a beautiful album, send copies to your grandmothers, and delete the rest.

I love this approach.

It features (with some overlaps):

1) Less is more.

2) Data hygiene.

3) Present for grandfather/grandmother/family.

The problem is that the more photos you made, the more difficult it becomes to pick a hundred. We leave behind so much data trails every day, including data which is no longer relevant. We constantly have to decide which data we keep or 'consume'. The problem is only becoming worse throughout the years (in history). Data is more easily available, and more easily able to be made (or fabricated!) now than 50 years ago.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#32

Post by tialaramex »

WalterBright wrote: post #19
shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

I buy new hard drives every year and copy all the data to them. Edit: It's not just the longevity of the drive (though after 20 years they often don't work at all). Drive interfaces change over time, and I have drives where there is no way to hook them up to a newer computer, and my old computers failed due to capacitor problems. For example, good luck trying to read a 5.25" floppy. You'll need to build your own hard…

The philosophy of just copying data makes sense, but your justification not so much.

> Drive interfaces change over time, and I have drives where there is no way to hook them up to a newer computer

20+ year old PC drives will have IDE interfaces, which you can of course get a USB adaptor for very cheaply and I have several laying about. Really old PCs or non-PC hardware (e.g. the Amstrad CPC 6128 in the 1980s had an after market hard disk option) will need a different adaptor, but it's still just not that hard, and certainly shouldn't be categorised as "there is no way".

> For example, good luck trying to read a 5.25" floppy. You'll need to build your own hardware and write your own device driver to do it.

You can easily buy refurbished 5.25" drives, and you can convert the data signal (which for a PC was basically the same as for 3.5" drives, but with a different physical connector) to USB. They're bulky and they need a lot of power at 12 volts, which is probably why off-the-shelf 5.25" USB floppy drives aren't a thing unlike for 3.5", but it won't require that you "build your own hardware" in any real sense.

You're only going to need to go writing device drivers if you've got some crazy disk format, and it'd have to be pretty crazy because the Catweasel already covered a lot of that territory (a Catweasel was a thing for Amigans, whose disks are a crazy format, to let them use PC disk drives to read their disks years ago, the last ones have an FPGA in them so that the uploadable firmware can decide how to control the drive).

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#33

Post by y4mi »

lrem wrote: post #27
shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

Processed photos and videos: Google Photos and YouTube. As an insider I know that I can't afford to match the availability of those and having the live display copy indestructible is soooo convenient. Downside: I don't think YouTube will give you back verbatim input material. Photos will, but it can be expensive. Raw media material after processing: single local HDD and a remote raid. Home directory: two local time m…

I agree that it's hard to beat the availability of Google consumer services... But that is not backup.

A backup serves as a fallback if for any reason the primary source has become unavailable.

In Google's case such an even can and does occur when your account gets banned because of some random event which you had hardly anything to do with or because your user was compromised.

A backup let's you recover from that and if you don't have that, I hope for your sake you don't mind losing the data too much, because the previous situations happen quite frequently if you actually listen on Twitter, Reddit or whatever social network you frequent.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#34

Post by Cthulhu_ »

shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

It would be neat to have a service that converts digital photos to the equivalent of film or microfilm, an analog medium that can be converted back to full size pictures in a hundred years. It would have to be scalable and cheap though, given how easy it is to take pictures nowadays.

But yeah, spend $100 / year and get a big film roll of your photo archive, that would be neat.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#35

Post by tonyedgecombe »

enriquto wrote: post #21
shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

Once a year, before christmas, you chose about a hundred of the best photos, print them in a beautiful album, send copies to your grandmothers, and delete the rest.

I've had a policy of keeping one photo a day and discarding the rest for some time now. It's quite freeing to not have to worry about keeping a huge digital archive.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#36

Post by ahje »

shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

I have a small laptop running a few services for home use, incl. a DLNA server and network storage. Media dropped on a specific network drive will be available over DLNA.

Makes it easy to look at photos from computers and DLNA capable TV's, but it doesn't work for archival purposes as the laptop used as a server isn't really redundant.

Our own laptops are backed up using a cloud backup solution.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#37

Post by rolal »

dvd-guy wrote: post #3

Anecdotal evidence, but I've recently gone through my ancient CD collection (in so doing, I found Ubuntu 6.04 installers, AOL dial-up CDs and other relics) and archived them with GNU DDrescue. It had no problem reading all bar a handful of CDs from the mid-to-late 90s and early 00's - the failure rate was much lower than I expected. The failures were mostly completely visually identifiable too - the layers had starte…

There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster which can automatically create par2 parity when you write DVDs or Bluray. The other important thing to do is always write and verify, a lot of disc errors are there from day 1 and not from the passage of time.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#38

Post by unimpressive »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #24
dvd-guy wrote: post #3

Anecdotal evidence, but I've recently gone through my ancient CD collection (in so doing, I found Ubuntu 6.04 installers, AOL dial-up CDs and other relics) and archived them with GNU DDrescue. It had no problem reading all bar a handful of CDs from the mid-to-late 90s and early 00's - the failure rate was much lower than I expected. The failures were mostly completely visually identifiable too - the layers had starte…

I have a CD-R of "alternatively obtained software" from December 1995, which I keep around mostly out of curiosity. It's got some forgettable old games and MIDI sequencing software on it, nothing interesting at all. But I'm wondering when it'll actually start deteriorating and ultimately fail. So far it seems to still be OK.

I would honestly just copy it as an iso with something like dd.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#39

Post by KozmoNau7 »

unimpressive wrote: post #38
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CD-R of "alternatively obtained software" from December 1995, which I keep around mostly out of curiosity. It's got some forgettable old games and MIDI sequencing software on it, nothing interesting at all. But I'm wondering when it'll actually start deteriorating and ultimately fail. So far it seems to still be OK.

I would honestly just copy it as an iso with something like dd.

There's nothing of any particular value on it. I'm keeping it around as an experiment, to see how long it'll last before the data is unreadable.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#40

Post by calyth2018 »

dvd-guy wrote: post #3

Anecdotal evidence, but I've recently gone through my ancient CD collection (in so doing, I found Ubuntu 6.04 installers, AOL dial-up CDs and other relics) and archived them with GNU DDrescue. It had no problem reading all bar a handful of CDs from the mid-to-late 90s and early 00's - the failure rate was much lower than I expected. The failures were mostly completely visually identifiable too - the layers had starte…

CDs? or CD-Rs?

Your Ubuntu 6.04 installer is probably burnt onto a CDR, unless you bought a pressed copy.

The AOL dial-up CDs are most certainly pressed CDs, and would have a far longer life.

I've seen bit rot in as little as 5 years on cheap CD-Rs.

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