You stealing my licks, dude?

Next month, there is supposedly going to be a big drop in outside storage device pricing, and a big jump in quality. I saw one of those backup harddrives at Staples recently...300 gigs for 200 bucks U.S. The problem with these is apparently the casing...it's shoddy or not worth it or something, and your data is going to be at just as much risk.

Those little flash devices are nice, but they're so expensive versus the storage space you get! These are apparently going to become much better in both price and storage capacity sometime in February, according to my husband.

I'm a corn dog, but I sort of go through and re-burn older discs after a year or two. I save the old ones, just to see how long before they really don't work. I've got some cheap-ass discs that are almost ten years old, I wrote on 'em with marker and everything, and they still work fine.

My "final solution" to this problem is to get a custom pc built that has an extra hard-drive within the tower, and that drive isn't hooked up to the interweb in any way. It's taking longer than planned, but will hopefully be worth it.

By the by...I'm saving some dough by getting the components for this pc individually and then having my husband and his genius geeky friend put it together...therefore I want to spend what I saved on a super-sweet monitor. Suggestions?

And it gets more frightening as we post - read this:

"When the sun has fused all of the hydrogen atoms into helium atoms
it will be finished. It would then start to cool and expand. Unfortunately
we think it would expand out beyond earth's orbit. We would be cooked."



Damnit!... so much for keeping my burned cd's in a cool place.....

What's all this about tits and licking? C'mon gents, In view of recent forum comments, aren't we supposed to be keeping things "PG13" here?

(Whatever that is! )

Hmm...I have several audio cd's that I have used over 5 years that are still in next to perfect condition. I dont store them anywhere special, either. I always make copies of audio cds I buy and use the copies, while keeping the originals safe in my safe.

Whats really bizarre is today I was wondering if original cds are laser-written or pressed. Guess this answers my question. What an odd coincidence...

I read this on Reuters' site:

I had several cd's of old images that i had saved
several years ago, last X-mas when I wanted to clean them all up and send out for printing--now that I had aquired some skill at fixing up vga quality digital images, well
the cd's read as full, and yet there were no files there at all.
I gues this explains it. not cool.

maybe you just don't know how to burn cd's properly...I could be wrong.

- you'd better be ready to duck the "Scion fist of fury" now...

(Or should that be the "Scion spinning disks of death"?)

ah, I could use a good tussle right now...bring it on!

I first remember the cd burners coming around in 99. It's 2006, shouldn't we have heard about this by now?

Well some of us already had!

Besides which - look how long magnetic tape, discs, cylinders and other more old-fashioned forms of data storage have lasted. Around twenty years or even more in many cases. Of course in many of those cases the quality has degraded and has to be restored and enhanced, but the original material is at least accessible.

Not to mention paper and parchment lasting anything from a couple of decades to several centuries...! So put against that, having CDs around that might date from 1999 is hardly an indication of real reliability.

The question is, will CDs (and DVDs and other forms of storage) last that long, both in terms of the data integrity, and in terms of having the hardware that is backward-compatible enough to read them? Almost certainly not.

Of course, as time goes by and technology develops, storage systems become more reliable and recopying large amounts of data is a lot less tedious and difficult that it used to be, but on the flip-side of that, a great deal more vital information is stored and processed electronically than ever before and increasingly, much of it is held in electronic form only, thus increasing the negative impact that could be caused in the event that the data is lost.

.
.
.

DO THIS AND YOU'LL BE ALRIGHT!

.


.
.

Remember: pg13 Tool!!!!!

Reinman, you should know that chiseling vital information into stone is a very bad idea. What happens when the acid rain comes?