[rescue] Backups

[Mike Hebel]

Someone generated the quantum flux that came across as... Geoffrey S.
Mendelson> On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:11:51AM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
>> I've tried it once and I've had friends try it at other times.
>> Neither one of us could get it to work more than once or twice.  The
>> biggest issue was obviously buffer underruns.  Tried it with Nero and
>> Roxio both.  I don't think the technology is there yet.
>
> Any DVD burner made since fall of 2004 will have some sort of buffer
> underrun prevention. CD's have had it since 2002.


I'm well aware of this however for proper streaming to the DVD-R/CD-R to
occur there has to be a number of things besides the burner configured
correctly.

For instance no matter how much underrun protection you have on your drive
the burner is likely to create a coaster if you're burning over a network
connection with a lot of traffic.  The same goes for a particularly slow
hard drive.  I've watched it repeatedly over the years.

Then there's the whole "backround services" issue.  For instance I've run
into occasions where having Direct CD installed causes burns to fail
because something on the bus and in the software won't leave the burner
alone during the burn.  And if you've got spyware, by some random chance,
you can probably forget about having a quiet enough system to do a good
backup on a burner.  When it comes down to it a burner uses up much mroe
system resources than a dedicated tape drive.  (This is not counting SCSI
burners obviously.  The SCSI controller buffers a lot of stuff for you.)

Your experiences may be different but I personally do not consider
DVD-R/CD-R to be a good backup solution.  They're slower than a properly
configured tape drive and on top of that the media only lasts ten years or
so per current technology research.  I know people that have DLTs and DEC
style tape that is still good after more than a decade - and will probably
still be good a decade later.

Mike Hebel
----
"Without balance and consistent growth the only option is to degrade. 
There is no other solution." - Anonymous