Some CDs of mine that I've tested:
11 year old pioneer disc - 0.72% unreadable
7 year old hitachi maxell disc - 0.54% damaged
7 year old TDK disc - perfectly readable
6 year old sony disc - 0.97% dameged and 0.36% unreadable
5 year old ritek disc - perfectly readable
and most surprising:
3 year old CMC magnetics disc - only 1.07% damaged

Memorex has been outsourcing for a while now, mostly to ritek I think.

Actually they're probably more like 12 or 13 years old, and still 100% readable. Not a single XIMAT or QIC tape of mine from that period still works BTW.

When it comes to long-term storage optical will always beat magnetic media.

Well, at this point, I am putting some of my faith back into recordable media. NOT MO, but as far as CD/DVDs are concerned, Memorex has been fairly decent, but Maxell seems to have been pretty good at data readability after a number of years. I think if I ever amass as much data as I did, next time I will probably get some company to make me some stamped discs, rather than burned, who knows. At this point I consider recordable media to be more reliable than HDs. I don't know about raid, and I don't see how tapes can be the most reliable since tapes wear out more, and I know I can't compare consumer tapes to pro backup tapes, but just like a vcr or cassette tape, it will degrade over time, so what effect would that have on data?

Jeebizz ... That really sucks. I also keep large archives of music and family pictures, as well as old code and other documents from as long as 15 years ago. I've lost hard drives, but I've been lucky enough to have made backups here and there, and thus far have been able to restore the data I most desire. (KNOCK ON WOOD!!!)

There are proponents of different types of backup. Tape backups are definitely the most well known for servers, and large amounts of data. CDs and DVDs are ok, but you can't plan on keeping them forever. (I've also got 10 year old CD's that I have no problem reteiving data from.) There's the RAID option. However, without a backup of your RAID, you still stand a chance of losing your data due to controller failure (not hard drive) or bad/evil software because it's on the same physical machine.

My current backup scheme is to keep live data on my server, and backing it up weekly to my wife's computer. This is 2 different computers, 2 different hard drives. That way if one of them is hit by lightening, or other hardware or software "anomaly", the data's still retrievable from the other system.

If you ever amass a similar amount of data than I would recommend two (or even three) external hdds. Keep one with your computer for constant access and rsync with the other one every week or so.

Your big mistake was only having one copy of your data. Just because you've labeled a drive as a backup doesn't magically make it invincible. Whatever media you use "redundancy" is the key word.

I just started to think about something... could it be that people complaining about unreadable CD/DVD's were using bad burning software back in the days? I mean, perhaps the programs did not burn properly back then or did not test the burned media, so we were "assuming" it was a good, 100% readable disc, when it was not. Not only because the media was bad (which should also be improved by now).

It is a known fact that some burners(software-wise) usually wrote crap to discs. Every application today is much better. Perhaps Nero is the only one that got worse and thinks that we all want to use Neroscout. I so hate Nero...

Sorry to hear of your loss Jeebizz. Sometimes the best lessons in life are the hard ones we face.

As mentioned already I think redundancy is the big thing. Keeping the data backed up in multiple locations, would be the best solution for ya. I most always recommend optical as a cheap backup solution just b/c you never know when a hard drive might go. And even going the extra mile with a RAID setup would be even better. This way the data you have backed up is in multiple locations...a few more hard disks and you actually have a portable copy. While I know everyone is different, I do think you should figure out what really does seriously need to be backed up and what doesn't. You have A LOT of info and IMO, not ALL of that needs to be on an external harddrive. Like some things could possibly be put on optical media and you can access those when you NEED them. And reburn the media eventually if you feel it may fail...I personally haven't had problems with aging optical media but then again my oldest disks are probably a year old. Every so often I just go through them and re-arrange how the data is layed out so I usually end up reburning em to new disks anyways. Disks are cheap so it's no biggie.

On a similar note, I have considered external hard disks but on another level I'd wonder if they'd fail quicker since they get shut off more. While this is kind of my theory does anyone out there have any insight into it?

the trend might be not to have any backup for most of the files/documents which are lets say more than a year old ... probably helps cutting down on possessivity which may "spin" the necessity of accumulating products/goods that we dont actually need ...


.

(Raid 1) <-- for hardware problems
+
DAT <-- for human errors and going backwards in time

Forget about the rest for long term backup
CDs/DVDs/External Disk have never been a reliable way of backing up. This is known in big companies.

Ah yes I forgot.. In case your house burns, put the DAT somewhere else

I suppose it's inevitable that each person gets caught at least once losing data without a usable backup. The more painful it is the less likely it will be to get caught again.

I use a system I call Paranoid Redundancy. I have a fileserver and two workstations. All user files reside on the server. Each workstation syncs once every hour with mirrordir to make a backup of the server data on the workstation. I do a full backup to DVD once a month, and incremental backups daily. The probability of losing all three hard drives at the same time is pretty small, so I am virtually 100% safe for having reliable data less than an hour out. The only times it will be necessary to restore from backup is if I should have a triple failure (like a house fire), or when I want something back that I have deleted or damaged. I keep copies of the backups at my daughter's house 15 miles away.

Don't ask what I experienced to become this paranoid.

Are you speaking in terms of quality, or just annoyed about neroscout? I have Nero Ultra 7 installed on my notebook, and I setup nero and bypassed neroscout all together. Perhaps you overlooked the option not to install it, but it is in the initial setup. I have never had any trouble with nero, and I like nero because of it's 'not holding your hand' gui approach, of course there is the wizard, but I never used it. I have seen the Roxio softwares, but thats just something I don't like, only because of the gui. I also remember one program, I don't even know if it is still around, but it was called NTI CDMaker. I used that when I first got my 2x cd burner back in the day.

Now as far as media is concerned, I think it also has something to do with the dye. I remember back in the days when CD-Rs first appeared, the dye color was kind of a dark greenish puke color, then it went to a somewhat blue color, until maybe late 1999 when it changed again to a lighter color (don't know how to describe it, just grab a CD-R nowadays and look.) I did have one disc, that took a lot of punishment, it was a blue dye CD-R I burned roughly 9 almost 10 years ago, still works, completely readable. It was a Verbatim disc. I guess though when it comes to CDs, perhaps for best results, choosing those 'cool color' discs, maybe is not a way to go and just choose the standard. I do have some black Memorex CD-Rs, but next time I will just be regular types. Who knows after another year or two they will change the dye on recordable DVD.

As far as burners, on my desktop, it is a TDK. That burner has been through quite a lot, and is still very reliable, I don't quite know the brand on my notebook. So I guess a quick recap, the best media to go with is the well known types, such as TDK, Memorex, Maxell, Verbatim, Sony, etc. Same with burners, though I can only think of TDK, Sony, and Pioneer off the top of my head right now.

I still find it hard to believe that tapes are more reliable than optical media, since tapes are more susceptible to data rot by magnetics, or just wear and tear. Of course as seen by everyone here though that optical media is still susceptible to data rot, I think it is at a much lower percentage rate, compared to tape, and even worse, data rot, or just like me, a complete failure of hardware.

Of course my mistake was putting all my data on that drive (putting my eggs in the proverbial basket), but the thing is when storage capacities get bigger and bigger, sifting through all that data gets more and more difficult. Not to mention keeping track of it.

Why use nero* for ripping when there is k3b? k3b is quite good, free and has technically overtaken nero since some time.

For optical, they may be safer but what's their price?

Yeah magnetical fields okay.. burry them then?

I don't think Nero is a burning program. It is more like a Cover Designer with a Indexed search engine and Avi2DVD converter. Besides it is also a Image editor program and a Media Player with support for Virtual Drive emulation. Maybe Nero 8 can also do me some coffee while I wait for my DVD to burn. Nero just happens to burn CD's/DVD's as well.

Regardless if I've missed or not neroscout during the installation (which I did twice), it should still provide a way to remove it afterwards. And it doesn't. I've tried to install the least features I could and it is taking over 190MB of disc space.

Personally, I think that "Nero" and "quality" should never be used in the same sentence. Unfortunately, Nero is still the best "Burning Software" available for Windows, together with CloneCD/DVD and Alcohol.

And the interesting thing is, half of the things Nero does, are not good enough. For example, Nero Vision is a joke. I still could not convert a .avi to DVD which worked. It either lags a lot when I put the converted disc on my DVD Player or the sound is not perfectly synchronized with the video. Meet Diko. I can convert avi to dvd and then burn the finished, converted files with Nero. No problems during playback.

Again, Nero Burning Rom is fine. Still, it is just a bunch of bloatware to me. K3B kicks the hell out of it, in my honest opinion. And it is free.

Ouch, Jeebizz. That sucks.

I'm getting more and more paranoid about my data these days. But at least my home folder can be completely tarred and compressed onto *one* DVD.
I wonder what I'll do when my home folder gets bigger?

I think it's worse when you have more documents, because you have more to wade through to decide what to backup. And it takes longer and longer.

Well I don't really have much of a problem with Nero. I never tried the Linux version, and although K3B is great, for some reason it doesn't burn discs at full speed on my notebook, even though DMA is set, however it burns full speed on my desktop. I dont pay much attention to the bloat of nero, though I agree it is getting rather bloated. I never use any of the other programs, just burning rom, and why the hell would I use their video converter, when tmpgenc is much better?

Also, I tend to burn a lot of dual layered discs, and I don't know how well K3B does dual layers. I think at this point, I am probably going to hope that blu ray overtakes hd-dvd because of capacity, though I am still not to happy about the many formats of DVDs. Unfortunately there is no real easy answer to backing up huge amounts of data (talking in terms to almost a quarter of a TB), and although there are also solid state hds out there, those are pricey, and don't hold probably as much as disc drives. Plus, solid states are essentially an EPROM, so now you have to worry about bit rot on those.