[rescue] Backups

[velociraptor]

On 6/21/05, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Mon, 20 Jun 2005 @ 12:42 -0400, Nadine said:
> TDK is one of them.  They are now made in India, and from what I have
> seen the platters warp at speed, aren't round, and sometimes the dye
> layers and mirror seem to be a little off.  I don't know if this is just
> growing pains, or something we can expect to continue.  So far I have
> had to throw away three stacks of media made in India, including some
> CD media.  One of them wobbleed so much my whole computer shook when
> reading the CD.

Ouch.  I haven't done a lot of experimenting with media.  For the
most part, I've been buying the cheap stuff, as I am using it more
as "short term" storage more than anything else.  Except in the
case of game backups, so I tend to use "name brand" for those.
I don't worry too much about the storage issues, as I don't tote
them around outside the house, generally (just "disposable"
mp3 disks that I toss music/audio books onto for road trips).

> TDK media from Taiwan seems to be OK.

> Taiyo Yuden still make their media in Japan, and it is still reportedly
> a consitently good buy.  Not sure if they made DVD media though.

I've also read their's is the best.

> Some media distribution companies will sell you sample packs of various
> media.  Otherwise buy 3-5 different kinds and test.

Iirc there was some indication that some media worked better in
some burners, too, so it really is a question of individual experi-
mentation.  Tough to build a matrix for this kind of stuff, and be
complete.

> Lite-On used to make some of the best CD burners, but the review sites
> gave them pretty bad reviews on DVD burners.  For at least a little
> while they were using a flawed burner chipset.
>
> Some people don't report problems though.  Have you had good luck with
> yours?

I do not have a first gen dual-layer Lite-On DVD burner.  Mine was
purchased around 6 months ago.  I have not yet tested it's dual
capabilities, but I have had no issues burning DVDs at this point.
I've backed up a couple of things I own for testing, after removing
the "extra" stuff to get it to fit on a single layer ("cheap" media). So
far, they've worked fine in the handful of DVD players I've tried.  I
haven't been able to test it for console backups--the consoles are
not here.

As an aside, making backups of this stuff is like learning an arcane
science...it's no wonder people go and get their consoles "modded"
with giganto hard drives so they can just load everything up and
ignore the individual pieces of media.  Once you have that, you
can just do HD->HD backups.  Wasn't there some company that
was selling a NAS with all the DVDs (and the DVDs already
ripped to the NAS)?

> One thing to remember with CDs and DVDs is that a lot of
> problems can be solved with both official and unofficial firmware
> updates.

Yeah.  I haven't spent much time looking into this. I've been
avoiding spending excessive hours after work on my computers.
I did use this method to get a Sony CD-RW to work in my
graphite G4 tower a while back.  Replacing the firmware with
a slightly later model's made it recognized by OS X as
"supported", and the CD-RW worked fine.  I had to use a PC
to upgrade the firmware, though.

> Kind of a hokey industry... you'd like to think they made it all work
> before shipping...

C'mon, you've been working in the computer industry long enough
to know how unlikely that is!  (Sadly.)

=Nadine=