I’ve finally joined the modern age, bye bye USB 2 and FW800. I now have a 2016 MacBook Pro running Monterey.
For a long time I have been archiving my image files to gold DVDs. I have them back 20 years or so, and believe it or not, from time to time I have to extract a file from them.
They work, or they did until I moved to this new Mac which has no onboard way to read them.
So it’s maybe time for a new system?
So for a start, let’s count out the cloud. First, it’s only as viable as the storage devices used by the Cloud service. Second, I’m on DSL and it takes 3 or 4 minutes to upload a 50M file to DropBox. Third, I have at present 2.8TB of image files in current backup, and that’s not everything I need to archive. My database has 875 4.7G DVDs in it. Fourth, lots of storage space costs small amounts of money, but they get you on the download fees.
The most serious of those reasons is the DSL, at least if one accepts the premise that the Cloud is both secure and reliable.
Finally, this is why I’ve used gold DVDs.
They hold only 4.7G of data, which means I can get that much data off my computer hard drive at a time. This means that, even though I run Time Machine, I have a safe archive much more frequently than if I used, say, Blu-ray. True, I have 4.7G of files waiting for permanent archiving sometimes for 3 or 4 weeks at a time, but they are at least backed up to Time Machine. With a medium like Blu-ray I’d have 25G or 50G waiting for a burning session. With a medium like SSD, I could archive whenever I wished, but the life of SSDs is apparently not as good as for Blu-ray. A few library and archive sites I visited today recommeded replacing the SSD every three years, whereas the gold DVDs are still readable (as long as I have a CD player) for 20.
So, discounting the Cloud, here’s the question.
What do you do? And why?
