Is burning thousands of files to a DVD a stupid thing to do?

[Insert_Nickname]

In any case, I'd prefer HDDs over optical media, yes. Stamped CDs and DVDs can last decades, but the ones you "burn" on consumer-grade "burners" probably won't. CD-Rs can probably last a good while, but DVD-Rs... wow. Due to the kinds of dyes and glues used, and reflecting material, there is a HUGE range of quality ranging from "yes this DVD-R will read 10 minutes from now and will be too corrupt to read 10 hours from now" to "real gold reflectors, will last a century." I use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs exclusively after a run-in with the former kind of DVD-R that got corrupted within weeks of burning. I expect my TY DVD-Rs to be readable for no more than a decade or so, even though TY is the best of the consumer-grade DVD-R makers when ti comes to quality.

My thoughts almost exactly. I prefer +R, they have slightly more robust error management and can locate data down to byte level. -R can't.

 

[blastingcap]

My thoughts almost exactly. I prefer +R, they have slightly more robust error management and can locate data down to byte level. -R can't.

Well if you are buying fresh, sure but I bought like 100 DVD-Rs and have only used about half of that so far. I have plenty of CD-Rs and CD-RWs... and yeah, RWs are even more susceptible to corruption than R, but I use them for short-term needs only. I don't think Blu-Ray drives and media will fall in price fast enough for me to burn even a single BD-R. So no optical media purchases by me for the foreseeable future.

 

[C1]

I have had to make a good number of CDs and DvDs for others to use and also for myself as backups. Two major points or issues to be aware of when writing optical media:

- When writing, that should be the only thing that the computer does. (Ya, I know all about the under buffering protection, but I have found that it is not always reliable as advertised.)

- Never write at the maximum speed of the media particularly if you are intending to fill the disk to near capacity. If you have 8X capable then write at 4X (even better at 2X particularly when writing movies on RW media).

 

[Revolution 11]

It seems some types of discs are better than others and writing speed plays a role in error rate. How about DVD burners? Are there models which are rated better or are less error-prone than others? Obviously, the technical and statistical information for this is not available but are there models that should be avoided at all cost?

 

[tweakboy]

It is just a matter of time blue ray burners for PC will be cheap and well be burning 40GB of data instead of 8GB DVD.

However the blueray discs will probably be 5 dollars blank disc,,, hmm...

DVD is just another form of backup and a good one, since it doesnt go on something mechanical. thx gl

 

[Coup27]

Back when hard drives were about 6GB my original music collection was burned to CD-R's but I standardised on expensive TDK discs and I am so glad of that decision now.

Some of these discs are well over a decade old now but each one has lived in a case and I have no problem reading from them.

In 2012 there are better ways of doing this but I also think the longevity of optical discs are a lot down to the quality of them to begin with. 100 disc cake boxes for £5/$8 just aren't worth the time if you value what's on them.

 

[Revolution 11]

Doesn't the model of burner apply to the longevity or are all models sufficient in this aspect?

 

[Auric]

DVD-RAM should be used instead. But even with DVD+R, UDF 2.50 or 2.60 for faster read and redundancy.

Ideally, one copy would remain on HDD and the DVD would be backup-only. Otherwise, better to write two DVD for any kind of irreplaceable data. And maybe do one with larger container files as mentioned for quicker retrieval, perhaps safeguarded with PAR2 as well.

I still use optical for backup redundancy because they are prone to different failure than HDD and of course have no cost associated with recovery since the media is hardware independent. BD-R costs no more than HDD per GB (BD-RE maybe better yet in the long run but at a speed penalty).

 

[BrightCandle]

DVD seek times are enormous, to the tune of 200ms. Given a seek per file you would still only retrieve 5 files a second but actually due to the file system lookups there are multiple seeks per file.

Years ago when installers used to give estimates for completion time and progress there was a game that was 1000's of small files and one massive file that was most of the disk. The small files took the grand majority of the time while representing just 1% of the total space used. The estimate for installation was thus totally wrong. This actually inspired me to write a better progress tracker for the copy of files that tracked both the number of files and the bytes remaining. DVDs are worse than CDs, which are much worse than HDDs which are significantly worse than SSDs in small transfers.

 

[Turbonium]

Ugh. I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 using an ISO I burned onto a DVD-R disc. I'm probably being paranoid, but now I feel like there's something "wrong" with my install, lol.

 

[Tsavo]

Ugh. I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 using an ISO I burned onto a DVD-R disc. I'm probably being paranoid, but now I feel like there's something "wrong" with my install, lol.

You don't have anything to fear.

Just hide your sharp kitchen knives at night.

 

[Turbonium]

You don't have anything to fear.

Just hide your sharp kitchen knives at night.

I lol'd.

 

[Cerb]

Ugh. I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 using an ISO I burned onto a DVD-R disc. I'm probably being paranoid, but now I feel like there's something "wrong" with my install, lol.

Windows readily fits on a single-layer disc, and you weren't letting it sit for awhile. These issues are all about aging and other wear. Even the worst discs will work fine fresh out of the burner. Also, DVDs have quite good error detection. The chances of experiencing silent data corruption (files read and copy without errors, but are corrupt) are too small to be worried about.

 

[Phynaz]

There is no problem burning bunch of pics or whatever to DVD. Its a good form of backup and one of the many forms.

The hard drive is mechanical so it can die anytime. DVD is solid so info will live for 30 years as long as there is no scratches and its clean dvd.

gl

Look up disk rot before you spout this nonsense.

 

[taltamir]

OP: Stop trying to attempt to copy files of the disk, it is going to take unfeasibly long amount of time due to the physical time it takes to reposition the optical head.

What you should do is create an image of the disk. This will read it once sequentially (at a decent speed) and create a file you can then mount on an emulated drive (or even open directly in programs like 7z) and browse at HDD speeds.

In the future:
1. Use http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html for optical media.
2. Compress many small files into archives before burning them to optical media.
3. Only use optical media to store critical info against theft, the bulk of the backups should be done HDDs.

 

[C1]

It seems some types of discs are better than others and writing speed plays a role in error rate. How about DVD burners? Are there models which are rated better or are less error-prone than others? Obviously, the technical and statistical information for this is not available but are there models that should be avoided at all cost?

Damn straight. Checkout your favorite burners and their error rates at CDR Labs:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/News/Optical-Storage/

PS: I have experienced difficulties reading written data disks on a different drive than the one on which they were created. The worst is UDF/Packet. Re-writable media can sometimes be a bit problematic (ie, not as robust across drives). If you do optical, write slowly and if you value the data lots, always keep the drive around that wrote the media.

 

[DominionSeraph]

15k files really isn't all that many in 8.5GB. Just sounds like you're having issues reading from the medium, which isn't surprising given that DL disks are crap.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

There is no problem burning bunch of pics or whatever to DVD. Its a good form of backup and one of the many forms.

The hard drive is mechanical so it can die anytime. DVD is solid so info will live for 30 years as long as there is no scratches and its clean dvd.

gl

. . But the drawback is the time it takes and the limit on how much you can fit on a disc. BD now offers the possibility of -- what? -- about 25GB I thought. But I wont' buy one until I see fewer reviews of these same problems mentioned by the OP, and greater hardware reliability.

I seem to be developing quite a collection of external HDD USB boxes -- many still with redeployed IDE disks. I bought a lot of StarTech hot-swap trays and caddies, all the same model and with extra caddies, so I can use them across the household computer inventory. A smaller set of these uses IDE drives; a larger number are SATA.

My cousin has been in business of real-estate and mortgage loans since the 1980s, and he plunged into computer technology about when I did: He once owned a "Trash-80." Yet, a decade's-worth of business and accounting files only amounted to maybe 6 or 7 GB in 2004, when I last assisted him with his SOHO network.

Maybe we just want the potential for storing every movie we every watched at least once. Or keeping the biggest audio collection in a 50-mile radius ( . . but what's new about that? You should see the pile of 33RPM wax platters I still want to transfer to a digital format.)

Think about this. If you can sort your data and files into two categories, you can reduce the amount of repetitive, needless backups. What data is fairly static and persistent -- changes and additions occuring infrequently? What data changes weekly or daily, or what data is "volatile?"

 

[taltamir]

There is no problem burning bunch of pics or whatever to DVD. Its a good form of backup and one of the many forms.

The hard drive is mechanical so it can die anytime. DVD is solid so info will live for 30 years as long as there is no scratches and its clean dvd.

gl

As you usual, nonsense.

Burned disks are far less reliable and shorter lived then mechanical HDDs.

Yes the HDD can break, but so can a DVD. Scratches are irrelevant to it, the data layer on a DVD chemically degrades over time. The target lifespan is 10 years for burned media and 100 years for pressed media. But in reality many burned media are unreadable after only 2-3 years.

 

[Revolution 11]

So the question now is "How much does a pressing machine cost?"

 

[taltamir]

So the question now is "How much does a pressing machine cost?"

That is a good one . But yea...
Or you could try archival grade optical media and drives:
http://blog.cdrom2go.com/2012/01/pioneer-bdr-pr1-archival-blu-ray-drive/

As well as compensating for degredation with extra parity via http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html

 

[capeconsultant]

Can you say... "64GB USB thumb Drive?" Oh yeah! CD's died when America Online (thankfully) stopped sending them out.

The time it takes to guess at and search for and purchase the right brand of DVD and then HOPEFULLY burn the files to it and then WONDER if it will work in the near future, well, you see where I am going with this

 

[Revolution 11]

Thumb drives don't strike me as more reliable than DVDs. If anything, I have had horrible failure rates with thumb drives compared to optical media bought in the last five years.


Taltamir: I was asking for academic interest purely, xD. Do you have a link for a good archival CD/DVD burner or does that Pioneer drive also work with CD/DVDs?

 

[Cerb]

Can you say... "64GB USB thumb Drive?" Oh yeah! CD's died when America Online (thankfully) stopped sending them out.

The time it takes to guess at and search for and purchase the right brand of DVD and then HOPEFULLY burn the files to it and then WONDER if it will work in the near future, well, you see where I am going with this

Newegg, Rima, or SuperMediaStore. Old stock MCC AZO or TY single-layer. You can luck up on quality rebrands, but it's the luck of the draw.

Then, just check the box that says to make an image, first, instead of burn on the fly.

New burners do a good enough job at >20x, that you should probably stick with whatever speed it wants to burn the media at.

 

[blastingcap]

Newegg, Rima, or SuperMediaStore. Old stock MCC AZO or TY single-layer. You can luck up on quality rebrands, but it's the luck of the draw.

Then, just check the box that says to make an image, first, instead of burn on the fly.

New burners do a good enough job at >20x, that you should probably stick with whatever speed it wants to burn the media at.

I can vouch for rima.com as selling A-grade TY's. I also bought some SuperMediaStores that I suspect were A-minus-grade or something (The rima TYs had better error rates than the SuperMediaStore TYs, for the exact same model of disc), at least for the bulk packs that come wrapped in plastic with no spindle. Possibly also for the spindle ones. But at least they are genuine. I've never bought TY from newegg so I can't comment on that.

Other stores I don't know; could be good, could be bad (like selling B-grade TY discs that were intended for markets like Mexico, not the USA). Could even be fake.

MCC can be maddening to find the MIJ rebadges so for sanity's sake it's Taiyo Yuden online, MCC or TY in stores (where you can check labels before buying).