-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Chris Jones wrote: > Is there an altogether better/smarter/reliabl-er solution?
IMHO, the smartest, fastest, most reliable and cheapest solution is to use external hard disks like usb-disks. You could reuse the same disk for more or less unlimited rw-cycles for an average lifetime of at least around 3 years (probably much longer, since it is not in permanent use). By the time it dies it has quite certain been much cheaper and environment friendly than all those dvd-rws plus the burner. Current hard disks have capacities of more than hundreds of DVD's. The main advantage, however, is that it is much, much faster (at least a factor of 10 on my system). Typical data transfer rates of usb disks are on the order of 1 GB/min. Plus you have about 100 times more space in one place. If you choose your backup strategy cleverly, an external hard disk can serve as a drop-in replacement for the hard disk of your computer, whenever that should be required. I've read quite a few tests that showed that DVDs and CDs are not very reliable as backup media. It gets worse if they get reused, because their performance degrades on subsequent burn cycles. Of course YMMV, that is just my personal experience ;-) I've just verified, that I can label the silver aluminium housing of my usb disk with a pencil. Cheers, Johannes FWIW, I use snapshot style backups of my whole disk (OS plus data). I can access hundreds of modifications of my data by just plugging a single usb-disk. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAklnD5kACgkQC1NzPRl9qEXSQgCcDc8QkwYf4ltqKflIzNPLQLH6 mV4AnR2/dZYfbf2/sQ1UutCz7lt7dvc5 =imAv -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
