The other day I was joined by Trek Zabota of the KDX staff who backed out of our private road (otherwise known as the driveway) while I viewed the backup on dashboard video, something I'd never seen before owing to a sheltered life.
Backing up radio programs is not viewable on video, except to the degree that the CD burning software is viewable on screen, and I got confused in under 10-seconds of beginning the project by the plethera of CD format choices.
Types of CD include Data CD, MP3CD, WMACD, Nero Digital Audio CD, Audio and Data CD, Bootable CD, Video CD, Slide-Show (VCD) and Super Video CD.
My Low Power Hour masters are in .WAV format, so I backed up on Data CD format, which probably worked.
For minutes I wondered why I was so clueless, given that I ran a professional CD duplication business for over ten years. But then I remembered...
The commercial CD format used by CD recordings consists of a single ISO file that gets burned to disc, and all these other formats are applicable to the computer environment.
My stash of blank CDs are just about depleted, so the next question will be... is there a better way to back up digital material? Maybe thumb drives or USB harddrives, or clouds?
Ask ten people about this and get ten answers. Here's one.
Any file on the computer can be backed up on a "data" CD as long as it fits. If you back up on CD make sure that you verify the write. I have had CDs fail due to a bad burn and data are not recoverable.
I now use rotating storage (fancy name for a hard disc) for backup. Since these are also prone to failure, two are used, each with a copy of the material to backup.
Neil
Neil, it's encouraging to learn, based on your input, that I am up-to-date in knowing what storage media is around.
That same fact is discouraging, because one would hope that by now there would be something better and more certain, but I guess the whole world is put together by failing systems, our only hope is that the house will still be standing while we live in it.
The only thing to count on is part 15 radio.
In the last 25 years I have nerver backed up anything. I see Dentists with bad teeth, airplane pilots who fly with mud daubers nests (mud) stuck in the pitot tube. They fly. There is nothing on my PC that would signal the end of the world. When I loose data, I try to retrieve it. Then I find some new cool stuff while looking for the lost files and I forget about what lost. Bottom line: I am hoarding crap I do not really need. I REFUSE TO BACK UP!!!
My human memory isn't backed up at all.
I THINK I remember having lost something once when a harddrive failed, and I BELIEVE it was something I wanted to keep, whatever it was.
My dentist's teeth are alright, but I think he does it by not eating food. He is as thin as a 3-meter pole.
Backups are only as good as the restore. For files this is not much of a problem but for disc images it can be problematic.
Once upon a time I purchased Norton Ghost and dutifully backed up my operating system disc. It took a failure for me to discover that Norton Ghost had produced files with errors and recovery was not possible.
Just today I did a system backup before installing some new software. I didn't like the new software and to remove all traces of it I did a restore. This took seven minutes which is less time that trying to uninstall the software and hunt for all the junk files it created. This is much better than using Windows System Restore.
Neil
I back up anything of importance on a separate hardrive, most importantly my station's complete playlist, jingles, and station ID's
Mark
The easiest way to back things up is to use a RAID box in RAID 1 mode - mirroring. It contains 2 identical hard drives, one of which is automatically mirrored with the other via hardware (so you don't forget). Keep all your data on what is seen by the O/S as one external drive. Only keep your O/S, programs, etc. on the system drive (which is a good idea in any event, to prolong the life of the drive). If one drive fails, the box automatically switches over to the other drive, but you are vulnerable to another failure until you replace the bad drive. When you do replace it, the box automatically rebuilds the mirror.
There are other RAID modes, but RAID 1 is the simplest. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disk drives (it uses one to store parity information), and is slightly less bad at storage use (in the case of 3 drives, you get to use 2/3 of the total space of the drives, as opposed to 1/2 with RAID 1). RAID 5 can also withstand a single drive failure. The advantages of RAID 5 are read performance, as data is striped across multiple disks, and the fact that you can use multiple drives (3+) to build a large,single storage device.
RAID 10 needs at least 4 drives, you only get 1/2 the total space to use, but it can withstand certain types of double drive failures. Increased reliability is the major advantasge of RAID 10, but it's at a cost.
The other problem with RAID 5 & 10 modes is that you need enterprise class hard drives (as the drives are very busy) - ordinary consumer drives can fail quickly. And if a drive does fail, you can't just pull out the other drives and use them, as the data is striped - with RAID 1 you can. That's why I usually recommend RAID 1 for most backup tasks.
I usually don't worry about backing up my system drive, as it's relatively easy to reinstall an operating system (and speed isn't of the essence, at least for me - I can usually be back up and running in an hour or so), but I do keep backups of the programs I install on a USB drive.
And besides, reinstalling an operating system is a good way to eliminate the crud that builds up over time on a working system (that causes it to run slower and slower). Yes, there are programs that claim to be able to do that, but I've never really trusted them - often they can do more harm than good.