Quote Originally Posted by joebloggs View Post
oh i've burn't all the photos and cam recordings onto dvds for last few years, thou i'm thinking of getting about a 500gb hdd to copy them all onto, as i've dug out some old data cds from maybe 7yrs ago, the cd coating on the top have faded a bit,even thou they been in a box in the dark , and most of my pc's couldn't read them any more, they are also fairly brittle, 75yr life span
so don't count on being able to read your cds/dvd's in a few years

the only thing i lost were a few docs i didnt really need, i deleted them thinking i had backed them up

Yeah agreed writeable CD/DVD media is not a long term backup solution, I've had this discussion elsewhere as well. Sadly hard drives have limited life too, the only safe backup method is to keep your data on the move and to have it in multiple locations.

Photos and Video are a specific problem though because the sheer amount of data can be so large. If you only have a few Gig's worth of pictures then online storage can be a good idea but always keep a local backup as well.

Compact Flash IS a long term storage medium for photos (100 year plus, better than Kodachrome ) if it is protected from heat, magnetism and radiation.

For photos I try to treat Compact flash as film i.e. once I've used a flash card I buy another one, they are so cheap these days that the per image cost is lower than it was in film/processing days.

Treat your flash memory as your negatives or slides and you will not go wrong you still need hard disk though, because you should always have a copy.

Reasons for Flash drives failing are usually logical rather than physical electrical problems and you can always recover something when it's a logical error. The other reason for failure is excessive use where individual memory addresses on the card get re-written many thousands of times so write once read many is a good approach for them

Ana did a full wash cycle on a 2GB lexar card about 3 years ago and it still works, I don't trust it but it does still work

No luck on the lost documents, I really hate losing things like that even if the content is not so important.



Jim