On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Daniel Troeder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, den 26.11.2008, 15:26 +0100 schrieb Florian Philipp: >> > As for my photos, I can back all the collection to a single DVD (and >> > to a second one, since I keep hearing that DVD-Rs are unreliable), and >> > since I don't take new photos every week, this solution is fine. >> >> A second DVD-R won't solve the problem because optical disks degrade >> over time and the second one will degrade just as fast as the first. >> What you need to do is to check the disks periodically (once a year is a >> good time frame). >> I myself would add a textfile with md5sums for all files to the DVD so >> you don't have to check them visually. I have recently taken this decision too. Unfortunately I haven't done so for some old backups (fortunately they still seem healthy) > You can buy so called "archival grade" DVD-Rs that should work for 10-20 > years in a good environment. There are hugh differences between > products. In germany you can buy very good ones from Verbatim for around > 2€/disk. This can be hard to find in my mid-sized Brazilian city. If I lived in the mega-metropolis of São Paulo, this would be far easier. And thanks very much for recommending Verbatim. I have heard of Taiyo Yuden, but that would likely be far harder to find.
Speaking of md5sum/shasum, do you know some tool that adds data redundancy? I heard dvddistaster does this, but I guess it is limited to DVDs. It would be great fo find a general data redundancy tool. In the moment, with the tools I know, the best I can do is store the files twice, with md5sums/shasums to decide which version is correct. By the way, it seems from my (limited) experience that even sha256sums are IO-bound (even on my not-so-powerful Athlon XP 2600+), so it makes sense to calculate sha256sums (as instead of md5sums) even it is overkill. To be doubly sure, one can calculate sha256sums *and* md5sums.
