OT: DVD Writing Software

Which I am. They don't take up a lot of room.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You'll still lose any changes, of course. Have you ever gone back five or ten years to see if the discs are still readable?

For me, 15 year old and still working fine. Just use a reliable brand, and a dont burn them too fast. Store them cool, dry and in the dark.

Have you actually tried to rebuild a system from a 15YO set of discs?

I just installed windows 98 on a laptop about 2 months ago from a CD I burnt a year or two after it came out. Then loaded win 3.11 and WFWG on a laptop off some floppies that are hard telling how old that I had made copies on the 3 inch disks. Office 97 burnt to a CD still loaded about 6 months ago. Not sure how old the laptops are , but they are old as I need some old slow computers to program some items made in the 1990s. Had to have one to load a program on a PCMCIA card.

I don't bother backing up the OS, just my own work. Very little of that is in proprietary formats.

I also keep just about everything under git for version control, with bare repositories on various boxes in various places. So if the latest backups are good, I have everything. If not, I have nearly everything.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Those old backups were zipped files only, from a DOS6.22 machine. And unzipping them to a test directory worked fine, which told me all the zip files were fine, or the unzipping would have failed. Those backups were from 1997, made on a SCSI cd writer CDR2607, 6 times read, 2 times write,price dutch florins 995.00 that hurt!!!) Used the GEAR desktop MM software. Testing Gear installation disk.... Still reading fine.

Bought in 1997 in a full desktop for a total of FL 7994.30( That hurt even more!!). So my first CD is about 18 to 19 years old.

I've never had CDs last long enough to trust them for backups. I use multiple hard disks.