OT: DVD Writing Software

A reliable optical medium has long been past due. I'm glad the issue has been addressed.

I'm surprised it isn't offered for commercial releases of content. Not enough serious stuff crapping out in it's useful lifetime, is my guess.

The only optical media that died on me, were killed by their carrier/container material degradation, operator use, or R/W hardware malfunction.

I've seen plenty of phyically pin-holed or chemistry plagued consumer discs though....just not in my own collections, yet.

For storage, I'd advise as small and simple as is practical for the data being stored.

Some people store everything........just finding what you need or what is actually important in all that crap could be an issue.

RL

There was a while there when it was thought that "the optical cube" would hit the scene.

Digital Solid State storage mediums killed that and it would be too costly to do.

Nice read rate though. Each layer could be read with a single pass of the scanning laser.

They did manage to store some 10GB onto a roll of shipping tape as an exercise of the multi-layer technology that would be needed though. Some folks in Germany IIRC.

snip

On a sunny day (Sat, 13 Feb 2016 10:36:11 -0500) it happened legg wrote in :

The commercial disks use a different process, not light sensitive.

Main thing I have found (and tested) is light as an error cause. It is like (I used to do a lot of photography), exposure time * light intensity. So if you keep your burned DVDs or Blurays in room light in a plastic transparent container, then you can calculate when the first data errors come. If the sun hits it, even indoors, that may only take 15 minutes. All my disks are in a huge alu light-tight box, at room temperature (about 21 C).

Yes, I returned some ...

I had a database, but that sucked. All disks have a number written on it, So I have a text file that has all disks, type, number, burn speed, burner used (make model), and contents, as well as date, as well as instructions how to read those (system I use has changed over time). A text editor (search) or 'grep' in Linux finds things in a second. Without that text file there is no way to find anything in a thousand disks.

But will they last even 20 years? They often don't last 2.

VHS tapes went from $10 to $2 in a few years.

I have lots of old CDRs from the '90s that read fine. HP gold mostly.

I've never had a Taiyo Yuden crap out on me. Get 'em while you can.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The U.S. Navy at China Lake tested them along with other CD's DVD's and said their accelerated tests indicated they should last 1000 years in normal storage.

Dan

Written in pencil on a cedar shake, I hope. That's as close as you can get to a Rosetta Stone, nowadays.

I think they discovered this recovering cadavers.....

RL

I have a dozen previously used and re-purposed hard drives with redundant copies of archives.

Each has 1 partition, and a partition has a volume label, so each drive has 1 volume label. The text of the volume label is written on a paper label on the edge of the drive.

I plug a drive into a SATA dock. I run a script that prompts for a drive letter. The script looks at that drive and creates a folder with the same name as the label, and under that folder it duplicates the directory structure of the drive with each file represented by a zero-byte text file (".txt" is appended to the full name).

The drive's free space is recorded in the name of another zero-byte file called "#### bytes free.txt" so I can see how much space is on each drive without plugging them all in.

If the folder already exists from a previous scan, it is checked for size. If it's zero bytes then it is deleted and recreated, otherwise it is renamed to flag it as outdated, but whatever file was accidentally put in it is not deleted.

When I search for a file, it might be found on the internal drive, or its name might be found in one of those folders. The name of the folder tells me which drive it's on.

On a sunny day (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:26:30 -0500) it happened "Tom Del Rosso" wrote in :

Yes, more complicated than I do, but more advanced!

I was thinking, as far as operating systems go, with their files and utilities, it seems to be moving towards saving whole systems. For example Raspi stuff is on SDcard, a 16 GB SDcard fits as image on a bluray. That means you have the whole configuration, just copy back the bluray image with 'dd' to an SDcard, and boot from it. The advantage is that you got the right compiler, right libraries, right utilities and for example all your old FPGA Xilinx stuff, old gcc versions, and old programs just work right away.

More and more laptops, and even bigger computers, can be used that way. Do not even need a harddisk, just stick the USB stick or memory card in, and boot from it. Since those FLASH media have no seek time, and the new ones are really fast, it outperforms expensive disks. I have two 1 TB magnetic USB disks in use, so also external, big data files like movies are there.

So the whole thing will get more modular. The other good thing is you just keep your OS in your pocket, and boot into it wherever you find a PC. Navigatrix is a nice example of a Linux distro that does everything for one specific purpose, and will boot almost on every 'computah'.

With ever faster internet it becomes 'I send you my system', like it now perhaps is: 'I send you my file'. Was reading that now want 5G in the US, 100 times faster, wonder what he carrier frequency will be.. THz? You need bandwidth, but THz has limited range, towers on every block?

Anyway for Raspberry I already use the backup SDcard script, do it in 2 pieces for both pertitions: Script /usr/local/sbin/backup-raspi-sd-card

echo "Unmount and remove any USB memory sticks" echo "Insert and power 1 TB USB harddisk, type ENTER when ready" read user_reply sleep 4 mount /dev/sdc8 /mnt/sdc8 cd /mnt/sdc8/backups/raspberry_pi/raspi_backups/ ls -rtl df echo "check for enough diskspace,

On a sunny day (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 09:25:14 -0500) it happened legg wrote in :

Yea, archaeologist will have a bit harder time digging up the remains of our civilization.

It is on optical, magnetic, and FLASH medium. I gave up on printing it out.

You could put it in the cloud I think.. Could get you in trouble too :-) Anyways those US ICBM launch codes were all zeros I have read. I do see an other wave of hacking paranoia traveling across the surface of the planet if I read the media right. Probably just an other attempt to get more tax money for 'defense'. Any 10 year old can crash the whole US infrastructure if they really want to. Murphy's laws says: 'If it can happen it will'.

Yes not my hobby.

Now about those dinos...