OT: DVD Writing Software

It might be. Genie will use any backup device that shows up as a drive. I backup to dual layer BluRay disks and an external hard drive. I don't know what tape drives it supports, since I haven't had one in 15 years or so. LOL

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

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

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.

The one issue I want solved is the following:

Why does the metallization on a stamped disk sometimes disappear or become transparent, when it is located between two sealed pieces of polycarbonate?

Usually happens in the middle of the disk..

All disks were stored in cool dry basement.

Steve

The Aluminization "rots" if oxygen was introduced during the laminationprocess.

Look up "disc rot" from the early 12" form factor Laser Disc days.

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

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Has anyone considered M-disc?

Dan

They're cool but super expensive, and at this point 20 years is probably OK. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not all that expensive now that they have a blue ray version that holds 25 G. That costs about $4 per disc. Not cheap but not super expensive.

Dan

Well, I've been paying about 20 cents for 4.7 GB Taiyo Yudens, so that's around 4x the price. Of course, getting 25G on one disc would be convenient, if you can write them at some reasonable speed.

Many of these things are going to be limited by the non-availability of drives that can read them before they actually die.

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.

On a sunny day (Fri, 12 Feb 2016 14:14:26 -0800 (PST)) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@krl.org" wrote in :

OK, yes I have used M-Disc for things I expect to sell later for mucho monete. 'carved in stone'.

Problem with long time storage is: WILL THERE BE WAYS TO READ IT?

As to DVD burning, I switched to BluRay years ago.

Yes I have a LG burner, and so far it works, does M-Disc too. I have other DVD burners too, no longer use DVD.

For burning I have been using

1) make a file named bluray.iso of size 25 GB with dd (if=/dev/zero ....) 2) make an ext2 filesystem on it with mkfs (so a filesystem on a file yes) 3) mount it on the loop device mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso /mnt/loop 4) copy your stuff there with cp .. /mnt/loop/ 5) umount /mnt/loop 6) burn it with growisofs -speed=4 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=bluray.iso 7) verify it with dvdimagecmp -a bluray.iso -b /dev/dvd (dvdimagecmp I wrote it it is one my site) 8) store it in a DARK I repeat DARK, and did I manetion DARK?, anways in a dark place, it is a light sensitive layer, time * exposure, OK? 9) I HAVE CONCLUDED THAT ALL THE CRAP ABOUT THIS MAKE OR THAT MAKE DVDS IS MOSTLY CRAP, I HAD TO RETURN SOME OF THAT STUFF YOU RELIGIOUSLY ADHERE TO BECAUSE OF FUNGUS BLACK SPOTS, AND PLENTY OF BAD DATA, NOW I AM USING THE CHEAPEST (APART FROM THOSE STONE DISCS) AND NO MORE ERRORS. BUT I DO NOT CHECK THINGS SO OFTEN, SAY NEVER, AS I HAVE ALMOST A THOUSAND, BUT WHEN I GRAB SOMETHING IT ALWAYS WORKS. I DO KEEP BACKUPS ON MAGNETIC HARDDISK TOO. AND ON FLASH

THE REASON FOR UPPER CASE IS IT USES LESS BITS THAN LOWER CASE. BUT IF YOU CANNOT READ IT YOU CAN SET THAT BIT AND IT BECOMES LOWER CASE AGAIN.

As to this make and that make I was with whats it 'Verbatim' but then they did something to the discs so those no longer worked on my LG burner since then I avoid Verbatim and use the cheap blurays. maybe not faster, but cheaper and better,

As to magnetic storage, after I bought the 1TB Seagate and ad a question about if for their 'support' they told me 'we do not support Linux' I never bought a seagate again, and use the cheapest harddisks.

Once some companies get big they become idiots it seems. Plenty of examples.

Same for FLASH memory.

I think it is obvious that to read back the ext2 blurays you have to mount it right? Also no authoring needed, and have been using growisofs since DX2 486 60 MHz days.

SO GOT IT?

(if not who cares) its your life your struggle.

:-)

On a sunny day (Fri, 12 Feb 2016 20:27:13 -0500) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :

Vinyl players are in again.

umped into

a thumb

media

yeh, I've tried to read some ~10-15 year old CDRs anything but an ancient 2x speed drive refuse to read them and even then most of them half the files can't be read

-Lasse

Maybe it is your house or your grubby fingers.