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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

#51

Post by dvd-guy »

calyth2018 wrote: post #40
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.

It was a mix of both - the Ubuntu 6.04 was in fact one of the freely distributed pressed ones, but many were home burned CD-Rs - photos, software, data backups, etc.

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

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

dewey wrote: post #45
yourfate wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recommend wasabi.com, they are a lot less expensive but also offer a full S3 api.

But do you want to trust a company you never heard of (in my case) over one that every big company relies on with your backups to safe a couple of bucks / month?

Yes. People get burned every day by well known big companies.

Side note: I’ve heard about Wasabi for a long time; they actively advertise on APMs Marketplace audio program about how much cheaper they are then S3 for storage and transfer. Backblaze B2 would’ve also been an acceptable alternative to S3.

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

#53

Post by tzakrajs »

mrguyorama wrote: post #42
tzakrajs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glacier is wonderful. I am able to store basically everything I want and it costs me less than $1/mo

The cost in glacier is if you ever need to retrieve data

Right which is free for the first 10GB each month and then is $0.01 per GB after that for standard retrieval.

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

#54

Post by tialaramex »

WalterBright wrote: post #46
tialaramex wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have several 5.25 drives laying around. The connectors still fit on them to the motherboard, but the BIOS no longer recognizes them, though the BIOS will recognize 3.5 floppy drives. I can't find any device that connects the drive with the computer that doesn't require writing a device driver. It's not a crazy disk format, it's DOS format. As for hard disk drive interfaces, I have a couple off the shelf USB interfa…

I can't speak to what's up with the BIOS versus 5.25" drives, beyond to say that I'm confident somebody out there has this working without writing device drivers.

For the USB to IDE thing, my guess would be that the USB interfaces you tried want to do some newer incarnation of ATA than the drive supports and so they can't communicate, at the extreme that could be LBA48 (48-bit logical block addressing, which is from this century and so obviously isn't going to work on say a 20 year old hard disk) but it could even be DMA, which was optional in early ATA specifications and might have been skipped by cheap manufacturers back in the day.

I don't think logical addressing itself was ever optional, but I guess it's possible that a _really_ old IDE drive might not implement it and yet work anyway in DOS which didn't originally use LBA mode. Doing CHS mode really would be asking a lot, compared to PIO (the alternative to DMA) which really a competent implementation of that USB adaptor ought to be able to do, slowly like a real PC.

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

#55

Post by enriquto »

dewey wrote: post #44
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In times where storage space is cheap is there really a difference between keeping one picture safe or keeping 100 safe? If you can keep one safe, you can keep 1000s safe with the same kind of process.

But how can you keep even a single picture safe? Are you able to read today any of your files from 20 years ago? Not in a theoretical sense.

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

#56

Post by dewey »

enriquto wrote: post #55
dewey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In times where storage space is cheap is there really a difference between keeping one picture safe or keeping 100 safe? If you can keep one safe, you can keep 1000s safe with the same kind of process.

But how can you keep even a single picture safe? Are you able to read today any of your files from 20 years ago? Not in a theoretical sense.

I was mostly referring to the previous comment about only keeping one picture and not a huge archive.

But I don’t see a problem opening images from 20 years ago. If you are worried just keep a jpeg or raw viewer app in the archive too. Worst case there will probably be emulators to run an ancient OS where your image viewer works and you can convert your images.

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

#57

Post by dewey »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
dewey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you want to trust a company you never heard of (in my case) over one that every big company relies on with your backups to safe a couple of bucks / month?

Yes. People get burned every day by well known big companies. Side note: I’ve heard about Wasabi for a long time; they actively advertise on APMs Marketplace audio program about how much cheaper they are then S3 for storage and transfer. Backblaze B2 would’ve also been an acceptable alternative to S3.

> Yes. People get burned every day by well known big companies.

Usually from free or niche products of well known big companies. S3 will probably not be deprecated over night without a appropriate notice period as half the internet depends on it in some way as you can see on S3 outages.

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

#58

Post by mrguyorama »

pmlnr wrote: post #49
mrguyorama wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do you predict Windows will no longer read FAT32? My first real computer was Windows 95b and that formatted FAT32 disks, and even my current 7 installation reads and writes FAT32 on flash drives

I was referring to bit flips and data corruption. Mirrored zfs can correct these, the rest of the filesystems can't. Flash drives are terrible mediums for backups unless you power them every month. When they loae charge they lose bits permanently.

Do flash drives every "refresh" unmodified storage? I'm not super familiar with the behavior of cheap flash storage controllers

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

#59

Post by WalterBright »

tialaramex wrote: post #54
WalterBright wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several 5.25 drives laying around. The connectors still fit on them to the motherboard, but the BIOS no longer recognizes them, though the BIOS will recognize 3.5 floppy drives. I can't find any device that connects the drive with the computer that doesn't require writing a device driver. It's not a crazy disk format, it's DOS format. As for hard disk drive interfaces, I have a couple off the shelf USB interfa…

I can't speak to what's up with the BIOS versus 5.25" drives, beyond to say that I'm confident somebody out there has this working without writing device drivers. For the USB to IDE thing, my guess would be that the USB interfaces you tried want to do some newer incarnation of ATA than the drive supports and so they can't communicate, at the extreme that could be LBA48 (48-bit logical block addressing, which is from…

> I'm confident somebody out there has this working without writing device drivers.

I google search for it now and then, and come up with nothing that can be simply installed and used.

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

#60

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dewey wrote: post #44
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In times where storage space is cheap is there really a difference between keeping one picture safe or keeping 100 safe? If you can keep one safe, you can keep 1000s safe with the same kind of process.

I think there is, my wife's photo archive has 30,000 images. Too big to zip up and put in an email, too big to put on a cheap USB stick, too big to quickly upload to S3, too big to properly catalogue and index, too big to really appreciate.

Less is more.

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