I tend not to trust hard drives for long term storage. In the past, I’ve had several drives failing after less than a year of moderate usage, leading to gigabytes of unrecoverable data…The prices for mass storage have considerably gone down, and unfortunately so has the quality/reliability in my opinion.

Just like video, uncompressed audio data and multitrack audio takes an awful lot of storage space; especially when working in stereo/24-bits/48kHz or 96kHz…In such cases, I usually have a second external hard drive solely as backup. After each session, it’s much faster and easier to copy all the contents from my dedicated audio drive to the second drive. I don’t have to worry about synchronizing the data contained on each volume or spliting its contents on multiple discs. At the end of a project, I usually burn them to multiple DVD-Rs (in both native and AIFF format).

I think the most problematic issue when archiving data is that of changing formats, standards and media in consumer electronics. Will the videos encoded today in whatever current MPEG standard be available in 20-30 years? Will the documents I’ve created in my favorite word processor (or any other proprietary format) in 1990, be readable in 2010? Will files compressed or split to fit multiple discs be still be retrievable in the next ten years? Or will the optical drives we use today be slowly be replaced by solid state drives (SSDs)…just like the audio CDs replaced vinyls and compact cassette tapes.

Over the last ten to fifteen years or so, de-facto standards and open formats like PDF, RTF, JPEG, WAV, AIFF, MPEG etc…have worked pretty well. Let’s hope the programs we’ll use in the next decades will still support those formats on which we’ve come to rely…

I know archiving focuses more on accessibility whereas backup is mostly about safeguarding, but the reliability of the archival media is relevant in both cases.

Eddy.

since i upload immediately after i find sometihng important [reason being: i am parano and unlucky when it comes to things blowing up], i never really feel the load big.. :p though after that, i never really would want to download what i uploaded, then i would prefer to waste the entire day searching dvds that looking for it on my host.

definitely, you are sick to be that crazy about quality for backup’ed data.

Seriously, if the Apple computer burned, I’d 1) buy a new one, or 2) recover the contents of the HDD from anothor ZFS-enabled operating system.

@Patrick: Most of my works, except my CV and PGP keys, are in the cloud. My code is in CVS. My MP3s can be ripped again or downloaded. Same for movies. There is very little for me to back-up actually.

Eddy.

Does SuperDuper do a real incremental backup or a differential backup? CCC calls its backup “incremental backup,” but it seems to be doing a differential backup where it will backup only files that have changed, unless of course, I have not clearly understood the difference between differential and incremental backups.

@Eddy
Some like to live dangerously I’ve been pretty serious about backing my data for a long time, but the most important reason is probably of what happened to me in Dec. 2004. Two days after having submitted my last assignments, my HDD died.

Eddy.

Seriously, I cannot wait for ZFS to be part of Mac OS X. One cool thing I would be able to do is making a storage pool with my internal and external HDDs as mirrors. Then, whenever I connect the external drive, ZFS will sync it to the internal one automatically.

Eddy.

I have been using SuperDuper! for two years now and I’ve been very satisfied.

It has even saved my ass once when I lost the internal hard disk of my MacBook.

It is free for basic use. But you only get incremental backups when you register.