External hard drives vs DVD's [Archive] - Canon Digital Photography Forums

aram535

14th of July 2008 (Mon), 20:32

HDD are nice because they are fast, but also can fail much faster than a DVD can.

The DVD is read-only, will probably last longer than the HDD and you can take it and put in a different location, parents house, safety deposit box, etc. HDD, if you had a fire or theft you'd lose it all.

I would say backup to a HDD and the DVD as you are doing now. If they are really slow to burn get a faster burner, even a external firewire or usb 2 if you had to (although internal would be a bit faster)

Whitlam

15th of July 2008 (Tue), 00:08

HDD are nice because they are fast, but also can fail much faster than a DVD can.

Very true, I accidently knocked one of my 500gb externals (LaCie) onto the side of my PC - whilst it (external HDD) was running and it stopped working.

Luckily there wasn't much on it - you have to be very careful with external drives

azpix

15th of July 2008 (Tue), 00:12

neil_g

15th of July 2008 (Tue), 04:22

whatever method(s) you choose youll have cons to concider..

hard disks - fast and large size storage yet prone to failure and are fragile
dvd - not fragile, easy to store yet slow writing and scratches will cause issues

the more different types of backup you use and spread them out over several locations obviously the better. personally i have copys on my work laptop, my home PC, ghost my laptop onto a work NAS and upload all my photos onto an internet based storage site.

versedmb

15th of July 2008 (Tue), 08:24

i considered dvds then someone here talked me out of it. right now, i download my pics via lightroom to my main external HD while backing up to a 2nd. both are 500 GB Western digital.
i'm glad i did it as the dvd thing was pain and becoming cumbersome.

I wish I could get away with what you do, but my Dell PC is getting old and my internal hard drive is only 60 GB!!! Thus, I have to move photos off of my hard drive simply due to space issues.

I will probably just keep doing what I've been doing for now unless anyone has any other suggestions. Thanks for the input.

aram535

16th of July 2008 (Wed), 08:34

I wish I could get away with what you do, but my Dell PC is getting old and my internal hard drive is only 60 GB!!! Thus, I have to move photos off of my hard drive simply due to space issues.

I will probably just keep doing what I've been doing for now unless anyone has any other suggestions. Thanks for the input.

You do know you can upgrade that drive right? Just put in the second drive, run a couple of programs and it will image your disk over to the new 750gb drive. Pull out the old, and boot off of the new disk.... viola 700gb of extra space.

Wilt

16th of July 2008 (Wed), 08:58

The DVD is read-only, will probably last longer than the HDD and you can take it and put in a different location, parents house, safety deposit box, etc. HDD, if you had a fire or theft you'd lose it all.)

Optical dyes in color films are damaged by light and by a number of common chemical fumes (wood! PVC!)Optical dyes make up a burnable DVD, and they have to be alterable at very high spin rate by the laser (faster than burnable CD), so does that sound at all stable to you? the RW type are the worst of all for permanane and the +R are the best of the DVD types in terms of long term. But there is NO FIELD PROVEN storage media that has over 50 year actual track record for permanence other than magnetic recording, not optical recording!

I would say backup to a HDD and the DVD as you are doing now.

For backup, DVD is fine. For archive, stick to harddrives that are not locked into the ever-changing CPU bus and harrdrive controller standards! USB external harddrives are a reasonable and portable way to copy data.

aram535

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 08:22

Optical dyes in color films are damaged by light and by a number of common chemical fumes (wood! PVC!)Optical dyes make up a burnable DVD, and they have to be alterable at very high spin rate by the laser (faster than burnable CD), so does that sound at all stable to you? the RW type are the worst of all for permanane and the +R are the best of the DVD types in terms of long term. But there is NO FIELD PROVEN storage media that has over 50 year actual track record for permanence other than magnetic recording, not optical recording!

For backup, DVD is fine. For archive, stick to harddrives that are not locked into the ever-changing CPU bus and harrdrive controller standards! USB external harddrives are a reasonable and portable way to copy data.

I would have to disagree with you just form experience, on everything but the ReadWritables. We're also talking DVDs more than CDs and there is no DVD-RW in general use today.

I don't think I have had a single hard drive ever that has lasted more than 10 years. Every one of them has failed. It's crazy to say a hard disk with its electronics, moving parts, multiple heads sitting on a platter as thin as your hair will last longer than a disc.

I still have my first backup cds and they work great (~15+ years now).

Get quality CDs/DVDs (not $0.01/disc ones) you can feel the difference when you hold a good one and a crappy one. Don't write on them with a Pen/Pencile/Sharpie, use a ball point. Put them in a proper case (not a paper sleeve) and put them in a bubblewrap or elecrostatic bag. They will last for a lifetime. If you really are worried, you can duplicate them every 25 years for pennies on the dollar.

Wilt

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 08:39

I would have to disagree with you just form experience, on everything but the ReadWritables. We're also talking DVDs more than CDs and there is no DVD-RW in general use today.

[quote=aram535;5927949]I don't think I have had a single hard drive ever that has lasted more than 10 years. Every one of them has failed. It's crazy to say a hard disk with its electronics, moving parts, multiple heads sitting on a platter as thin as your hair will last longer than a disc.

No, the point was not the mechanical durability, but the durability of the recording media...magnetics has been in use now for over 60 years (70 years?) You can always TURN OFF a harddrive and the recording will continue to sit there with the permanence of magnetics...in fact my USB drives are never powered on unless I am retrieving or writing data to them...stretching out the hours in the MTBF stats.

OTOH we have only statistical analysis about the durability of optical dyes in CD and DVD, and we know that there is ONE long lasting dye family among the several CD dye famililes. And the manufacturers are being very, very secretive about DVD dyes. One thing that is known about DVD is that the DVD+R has better error checking than the other DVD technologies in the recording stream. And we do have incidents reported about CD-written data no longer retrieveable, including doctoral thesis work!

I still have my first backup cds and they work great (~15+ years now).

Yes, and I also know of incidents of failed burnable CD and DVD! I have one, myself.

Get quality CDs/DVDs (not $0.01/disc ones) you can feel the difference when you hold a good one and a crappy one. Don't write on them with a Pen/Pencile/Sharpie, use a ball point. Put them in a proper case (not a paper sleeve) and put them in a bubblewrap or elecrostatic bag. They will last for a lifetime. If you really are worried, you can duplicate them every 25 years for pennies on the dollar.

All good recommendations...except I have my doubts about the bubblewrap or electrostatic bag. I dunno about those, I do know that plasticizers in vinyl are bad on organic dyes, polyethylene is OK...one indicator is that if a photocopy sticks to it after it has been in contact for a while, bad; if not, good.

UncleRojelio

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 15:01

Get four 750 GB drives and setup a RAID5. Absitively posolutely guaranteed.

Wilt

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 15:08

Get four 750 GB drives and setup a RAID5. Absitively posolutely guaranteed.

Talk to the guy whose RAID failed when the fan when out, causing all the harddrives to fry!

Yogesh Sarkar

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 15:26

If the data is that important, then get an internet based backup system along with the normal hdd backup.

jmcder53

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 15:31

i've always heard that CDs lasted longer and were more stable than DVDs. there are some companies, such as Delkin, that make archiveable CD, DVD media. the cds they say are rated for 300 ear, and dvd are rated for 100 years. they have some sort of gold plating or something, they make some that are more scratch resistant, the normal gold ones, and then ones you can print to. i'm sure in 10 years there will be a new media and everyone will start transferring files over to that.
in addition to what aram535 said, they make a set of markers that are designed for writing on the surface. i have some (red, blue, green, black) made by memorex. and i'm sure other companies also make them

one question i would like to ad that is relevant to this: are you supposed to store the CD/DVD upright (vertical), or flat (horizontal)? i've heard people swear by both.

Wilt

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 16:37

one question i would like to ad that is relevant to this: are you supposed to store the CD/DVD upright (vertical), or flat (horizontal)? i've heard people swear by both.

upright

aram535

17th of July 2008 (Thu), 22:46

If the data is that important, then get an internet based backup system along with the normal hdd backup.

I'm going to change my vote as well, I would still keep a copy of the images on DVDs, but using something like Mozy, now that there is a unlimited plan, is not a half bad idea.

I think their plan is $4.95/month/machine for unlimited.

renlok

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 02:12

Mozy is good if you want to backup your best shots and files.
But I wouldn't want to try uploading gigs and gigs of photos(would be much faster just to burn them to dvd). Maybe look into setting up a server at home, its alot cheaper these days than most people think.

Collin85

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 02:39

Optical discs don't always last longer than hard drives.

Personally, I store my old photos, movies etc. pretty much all on externals. I use two externals for each set of data, and upto three for critical data. I've been doing this for a few years now and has amassed around 4TB worth of hard disks.

I used to prop RAID setups, but that stopped after the halting of my gaming hobby (and subsequently, my desktop building predispositions), so nowadays I've just got 1-2 laptops and a whole heap of external drives.

I've had a few internal drives fail on me over the years, but rarely any failures with externals yet, mainly due to the fact that I hardly ever need to access the data once on the externals. One exception was one of my Maxtor 500GBs, which failed after two days. That particular line had an issue with cooling, so now I've always been very cautious with all 3.5' externals. I'll switch the power off as soon as I've finished with the backup, just to be safe incase I forget later and it ends up spinning for hours on end.

I've given up on DVDs for awhile now. 6GB is nothing these days and the hassle and time it takes to backup to them just doesn't make sense to me personally. Gigs per dollar wise, DVDs win by miles, but the time-is-money factor instantly dismisses it for me.

gooble

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 03:00

I have an internal drive with all my data. I backup daily to an external drive. I also backup daily to two other externals that I rotate through by taking them to my office.

Every day I take one to work and swap it for the other then take it home, back it up and repeat the next day. That way there is always a full backup in both locations and a third possibly in transit.

I also want to backup to DVD and leave at a relatives however I have nearly 200GB of photos alone which would be at least 25 DL-DVD. If I were to backup all my data it'd probably be about 1.5TB. That's a lot of DVDs.

While I'm using lots of hard drives I've read that they become less reliable the less frequently you use them. Apparently, if you don't run them regularly and heat them up the lubricants can get sticky and cause problems.

nwa2

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 03:41

A point not covered on CDs' / DVDs' is that you do not know they have failed until you come to look at the data (maybe in five years). I use multiple HDDs' ( mix of internal & external), a big advantage is that they are used regularly and tested regularly allowing early signs of data reliability to be detected.

In 20 years of using personal PC's I have had (some) components fail, seen many floppy and optical discs fail, but never had a HDD fail, although I accept there will be others with the opposite experience.

rklepper

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 08:02

External HDD work very well, but you really need to have 3 drives. You should have an internal that is your working drive and 2 externals that are your backups. One stays at home and the other goes somewhere away from home. I keep my off-site backup at work.

TMaG82

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 08:45

Not sure how accurate their claim is about unlimited storage, but so far I've put up about 8 gigs worth of photos on my Flickr Pro account and no problems aside from it being somewhat slow to transfer. But easily remedied by setting it to upload, go run some errands, and come back and done. Can't beat the price or $25 for a year. Obviously I have my photos on my internal HD, an external HD, and I burn a backup DVD, but having the unlimited Flickr account is just another backup plan.

AdamC

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 09:31

Talk to the guy whose RAID failed when the fan when out, causing all the harddrives to fry!

Wow, unlucky. most HHDs will run happily even if quite warm, so I can only guess that this particular enclosure was rather poorly designed WRT thermal dissipation. This is one of the reasons I was considering whether it would be better to set up two single-drive NAS devices with a scheduled snychronisation between them, rather than a single RAIDed device.

Don't write on them with a Pen/Pencile/Sharpie, use a ball point.

Actually writing on a CD/DVD with a ball point pen is a Very Bad Idea - you can very easily damage the recording surface. Much better to stick to a regular black marker pen.

Not sure how accurate their claim is about unlimited storage, but so far I've put up about 8 gigs worth of photos on my Flickr Pro account and no problems aside from it being somewhat slow to transfer. But easily remedied by setting it to upload, go run some errands, and come back and done. Can't beat the price or $25 for a year. Obviously I have my photos on my internal HD, an external HD, and I burn a backup DVD, but having the unlimited Flickr account is just another backup plan.

This is an excellent idea, as long as you don't rely on it as your only backup. having offsite backups protects you against disasters such as flooding or fire.

As should be clear by now to anyone who's read this thread, no medium is infallible. The only real answer is to have multiple backups in multiple physical locations. I have my working copy on my desktop, plus a copy on my laptop, plus I upload offsite to a Dreamhost account. When I can afford it, I'll be adding a NAS device (or two) to my home network as well.

JohnnyG

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 10:12

DVD's are not really good for storage due to their fragile nature and relatively small recording space. External hard drives are also a problem and offer very little extra protection as they can fail more often than an internal. An internal hard drive is really as good. If something goes wrong with the computer, you can remove an internal drive and put it in another computer as long as they're running Windows. I haven't yet found where that doesn't work.

I've also used an external drive to store my pictures then took it to the neighbor to store. The box is small and he doesn't mind. The idea being if my house burned down, I would still have my pictures.

There are external online storage available but I've found they're expensive when storing as much as I have to store but it would be safe. Back-ups are important but hard to manage for sure.

TMaG82

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 10:24

I'm actually going to try storing some video on Flickr later today. Limit of 150-250MB or so, and 90 seconds, but I can split it up.

ben_r_

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 11:14

I have a Raid 1 setup on the PC to protect against the immediate failure of a PC hard drive to save anything i havent already backed up. I have an external 750GB that I back up everything to. And I make dual layer DVD back ups of all my images which will soon be stored either in a fire safe or off site probably in my safety deposit box. So with all three of those methods used I am confident that Im well covered.

jmcder53

19th of July 2008 (Sat), 20:23

what's the story with Blu-Ray discs? they can hold i'm guessing around 25 gigs. how do they hold up?
in the grand scheme, cd's and dvd media are relatively inexpensive. even though a disc would be rated for 5 years, or 25 years, i'd still probably transfer the images to new media. same with the newer hard drives. some probably run about 100 bucks. just after a few years transfer them over.
this might have already been suggested, but i wouldn't store all the photos on one drive. most people have more photos than would fit on one hard drive, even with what i've read the comments on about these online services. i don't know what they would cost, but i wouldn't put all in one site. it's bad to lose images, but worst to lose them all. ok that was my one intelligent tidbit of information for the day.

azpix

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 01:36

joeseph

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 03:50

just curious, of those that use externals, how many of you have had them fail or had issues.

i've felt pretty good with my system of saving on EHD 1 and backing up on e EHD 2 but you have me 2nd guessing it. I was thinking saving my processed Jpegs to DVD in addition to the above. what's a boy to do.
best not to ask weka2000 about this, he's managed to lose a whole drive's worth of data this weekend due to mechanical shock to the drive while running.

Personally I had a 2.5" external drive fail a few weeks ago. No idea when it died exactly, just went to use it & it wouldn't spin up.

AdamC

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 04:29

just curious, of those that use externals, how many of you have had them fail or had issues.

Make no mistake - all drives will fail - it's only a matter of when.

René Damkot

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 06:37

in the grand scheme, cd's and dvd media are relatively inexpensive.
HDD are cheaper per Gb.
even though a disc would be rated for 5 years, or 25 years, i'd still probably transfer the images to new media
I have about 550 DvD's as of now.
I can think of better ways wasting time then to copy all of them...

Images get backed up on an external HDD, and burned to two DvD's (Raw's on one, finished images on a different one).
If all three fail, that's probably the way it was meant to be.

jmcder53

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 15:01

true, didn't think about that. that is alot of dvds. i guess i'm thinking of the files produced by a 20d. 3mb for a fine jpeg, 8meg for RAW, but then when it comes to editing they can get on up there. i scanned some negatives that were damaged, just to practice repairing old photos for people. full resolution negative scan was 80mb. one that i did alot of photoshop to was right at 500mg. so i guess it can fill up quicker.
i'm kind of obsessive compulsive at times. I do right the date that i burned the disc, a working disc and an archive disc.
look at 10 years ago. noone could tell you how much a gigabyte is, now we are getting into terabytes. i'm sure disc technology will catch up to that one day. then those 500dvds, could fit onto 10 (i suck at math, someone else can divide and get the correct answer)

Smitty2001

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 15:15

Wilt

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 15:15

DVD's are not really good for storage due to their fragile nature and relatively small recording space. External hard drives are also a problem and offer very little extra protection as they can fail more often than an internal. An internal hard drive is really as good. If something goes wrong with the computer, you can remove an internal drive and put it in another computer as long as they're running Windows. I haven't yet found where that doesn't work..

...assuming the internal harddrive uses the same controller type which is in both computers -- otherwise your data is still captive in the harddrive. The ever changing harddrive controller standards makes the situation challenging. ST506, ESDI, IDE, EIDE, ATA, IATA, SATA, SCSI, SCSI 2, SCSI 3 since the 1980's alone!

Wilt

20th of July 2008 (Sun), 15:18

best not to ask weka2000 about this, he's managed to lose a whole drive's worth of data this weekend due to mechanical shock to the drive while running.

Personally I had a 2.5" external drive fail a few weeks ago. No idea when it died exactly, just went to use it & it wouldn't spin up.

Internal and external drives are likely to use the same drive! The failure of external vs. internal could be no difference at all, if both live in the office and never move from that location.

xenomorphic

21st of July 2008 (Mon), 06:31

I use the Firmtek Seritek/5PM (http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/) external harddrive enclosure for multiple mirrored RAID setups using one of FirmTeks port-multiplier e-SATA cards to connect it to my Mac (its also Win/Linux compatible). Features two silent cooling fans with a warning system incase a fan should fail, as well as a number of other nice features. I keep an extra disk from the mirror offsite and regularly return it to the RAID mirror where it is automatically rebuilt so it is up to date.

I use a progam called SoftRAID to control the RAID setup - and I can't recommend this enough - its worked flawlessly for years, even through a drive failure and mirror-rebuild that happened a while back.

Drives will fail, but the chance of several failing at once in different places is small(er) :)

Lester Wareham

21st of July 2008 (Mon), 06:58

Right now I back up all of my photos on an external hard drive and I save another copy to DVD's.

The DVD's take a long time to burn however and so I was considering saving to two different external hard drives instead of DVD's.

What do you think? Are external hard drives not reliable enough to do this? - even if I use two different external hard drives, duplicates of one another?

HDD are nice because they are fast, but also can fail much faster than a DVD can.

The DVD is read-only, will probably last longer than the HDD and you can take it and put in a different location, parents house, safety deposit box, etc. HDD, if you had a fire or theft you'd lose it all.

I would say backup to a HDD and the DVD as you are doing now. If they are really slow to burn get a faster burner, even a external firewire or usb 2 if you had to (although internal would be a bit faster)

In fact the archival properties of DVDs are not well defined; they can degrade over time and become unreadable within a few years. A lot depends on storage temperature, orientation, humidity and any labelling added. I would steer clear of them except for shot term usage.

I use two 500Gb external drives stored (unpowered) in different parts of the house.

If necessary you can store one off-site also. Unless you are running a business if you have a fire or flood you have bigger things to worry about that data backup IMHO.

The procedure is to incremental backup/verify to one internal drive, copy/verify to a second internal drive (separate physical drives) and then copy/verify to the two external drives before deleting of the internal drives. This procedure means the system can back itself up to the internal drives without supervision and minimises the powered up time of the external drives.

In fact from the moment the images are copied off the CF card they always exist in at least two places, I copy to the main location on one internal drive and then a safety temp copy to the other internal drive before cleaning up the CF card. I can delete the temp copy after the backups have been saved.

Collin85

22nd of July 2008 (Tue), 06:09

HDD are cheaper per Gb.

Are you serious? HDDs must be relatively expensive in the Netherlands. ;)

Down Under, a 1TB drive (take a typical internal Seagate Barricuda 3.5") can be had for around $250AUD online. That makes 4GB per dollar.

As for DVDs, one can typically obtain packs of 100 for around $35AUD at large retailers and around $25AUD for 50 packs. That's around 9-13GB per dollar.

Considering other cheaper (lower capacity) combinations yield similar conclusions. Take a 250GB drive (must lower value) for $125AUD vs. a pack of 10 DVDs for around $8AUD. That's 2GB per dollar vs. 6GB per dollar, so DVDs win again. Now I chose internal HDDs, so DVDs win by an even bigger margin if we were talking about externals.

I'd expect that similar ratios hold for large markets like the US and Great Britain.

Now like I said in my previous post, I much prefer HDDs to DVDs for storage. But HDDs having better capacity value compared to DVDs is big news to me!