Which DVD should be used for best results

Dogdots

I am transferring all my photos from CD's to DVD's. And I would like to know the best ones to use.

I want a DVD that I can keep adding to. I was told by Dell that the Dell machines have a problem with Memorex CD/DVD's so I'm thinking Sony or some other brand.

Any advice before I go shopping for them?

If this is the wrong places--bump me to the right one

claudermilk

Is this for archiving? In which case my answer is: none. DVDs are unsuitable for archiving, use external/removable hard drives instead.

Dogdots

claudermilk wrote:

Is this for archiving? In which case my answer is: none. DVDs are unsuitable for archiving, use external/removable hard drives instead.

It will be the backups in case my external doesn't work, etc. I haven't gotten the external yet, but will be doing so soon.

jziegler

Taiyo-Yuden discs usually get good marks. Although there are apparently fakes out on the market to watch out for. newegg.com sells the real ones for a good price.

Dogdots

jziegler wrote:

Taiyo-Yuden discs usually get good marks. Although there are apparently fakes out on the market to watch out for. newegg.com sells the real ones for a good price.

Wow...never heard of this brand...I'm so out the loop of discs Thanks!

jziegler

Dogdots wrote:

Wow...never heard of this brand...I'm so out the loop of discs Thanks!

They aren't ever sold as a retail brand (except maybe in Japan). They actually manufacter the amterials and discs, and they are sometime labelled and sold as some of the normal retail brands. But, those brands change suppliers to whoever is cheapest regularly (Memorex seems particularly bad at this) so you never know what you get. If you order from newegg, you'll get a spindle of blank discs with a paper label on top, and an address type label on the side of the package stating what the discs are.

Dogdots

jziegler wrote:

They aren't ever sold as a retail brand (except maybe in Japan). They actually manufacter the amterials and discs, and they are sometime labelled and sold as some of the normal retail brands. But, those brands change suppliers to whoever is cheapest regularly (Memorex seems particularly bad at this) so you never know what you get. If you order from newegg, you'll get a spindle of blank discs with a paper label on top, and an address type label on the side of the package stating what the discs are.

Thanks for the informtion. I checked them out on newegg and not a bad price.

claudermilk

I still say avoid any DVDs for backup/archive like the plague. I have a large pile of examples of why they are not a good idea. I recommend external/removable harddrives, preferably redundant copies. They are more reliable regardless of what theoretical disasters the alarmists come up with, more convenient with large capacities, and far cheaper per GB to obtain.

Dogdots

claudermilk wrote:

I still say avoid any DVDs for backup/archive like the plague. I have a large pile of examples of why they are not a good idea. I recommend external/removable harddrives, preferably redundant copies. They are more reliable regardless of what theoretical disasters the alarmists come up with, more convenient with large capacities, and far cheaper per GB to obtain.

So you don't use DVD's at all....just externals?

You mention redundant copies....what do you mean by that?

claudermilk

Yes, no DVDs for archives at all. I only use them for distribution when neccessary. By redundant copies, I mean two separate drives with the same data backed up on them; that way if one dies on you, there is the other still around. The likelihood of your main drive and both backups failing simultaneously is vanishingly small.

SloYerRoll

100%

And you don't leave your external hard drives plugged in and running all the time anyway. Just fire them up once a week (or whenever fits your needs) and run the backup. Disconnect and be happy knowing even if your computer flips out and fries everything connected to it. Your data it still safe.

ChrisJ

Yep, that's how I run my backups at home, too... I keep the external drive off most of the time.

I do burn "archival" DVDs occassionally, but I would never rely on them. They're much more portable than the external HD.

SloYerRoll

ChrisJ wrote:

I do burn "archival" DVDs occassionally, but I would never rely on them. They're much more portable than the external HD.

I think the reason Chris is saying don't do that is because it can turn into a jungle of DVD's and you never really know which one you can toss.
I did it for a while then spent one day copying every file on every DVD I had over to my 2nd internal drive, tossed the DVD's and never looked back.

I aslo b/u to an external as well.

cmason

Simple answer: TDK

You can google this, and pour thru tons of forums with folks who seem to REALLY be into this, down to the manufacturer of disks and batches of disks...

...and I did. End of everything I read (and couldn't entirely follow), is that of all the brands, the one that seems to be at the top of the list more often is TDK. They seem to be a specialist manufacturer, while many others are simply brands slapped on 3rd party manufacturer.

So based on this, I bought TDK 16x DVD-R disks, and have been thru 50 of them so far with no issues.

Dogdots

Ok....exteranl is the way But I will still do the old school of DVD's just to satisfy my old school ways.....along with the external.

Now onto which external Not the $500.00 one...I couldn't get that one past the hubby. I was searching the site and couldn't find out how much each drive was. Is it a hidden secret or didn't I look good enough.

SloYerRoll

You definately don't have to buy the DROBO. It's sweet. Just not necessary (yet).

How much space do you need? 250GB? 500GB? 1TB (1 Tarabyte = 1000GB)? Remember to think ahead. You don't want to have to buy another backup drive for a few years.. Almost every time I go out to shoot, I come back w/ at least 2GB of shots...

Also, how secure do you want your data? Do you want 2 external drives for redundancy?

Give a price range if your not sure and we'll try our best to spend your money as wisely as possible.

Once you answer that. We'll get your workflow set up so it's nice and painless. I promise

Dogdots

SloYerRoll wrote:

You definately don't have to buy the DROBO. It's sweet. Just not necessary (yet).

How much space do you need? 250GB? 500GB? 1TB (1 Tarabyte = 1000GB)? Remember to think ahead. You don't want to have to buy another backup drive for a few years.. Almost every time I go out to shoot, I come back w/ at least 2GB of shots...

Also, how secure do you want your data? Do you want 2 external drives for redundancy?

Give a price range if your not sure and we'll try our best to spend your money as wisely as possible.

Once you answer that. We'll get your workflow set up so it's nice and painless. I promise

Oh but the DROBO would be soooo sweet

Ok....I want to take my CD-RW's and transfer them to DVD's and also all my photos to an external. As for size of the external..which ever is better. Many smaller ones or just a few middle sized ones or one big one...Now I'm sounding like the three bears

My work flow always was to download my photos onto the computer and then put the keepers onto a CD-RW. Then I would edited off the file that was still on the computer. After that I would copy my edits to another CD-RW. So I have a stack of unedited discs and a stack of edited discs.

I do have the smugmug site for backup and thought that maybe only my keepers that are edited would stay there and then all the others to DVD, but I don't know about that. An external at home in my hands sounds good to me

As far as hooking up and running an external.....that is all new to me. So help is what I would need. I've looked over many different kinds and also with input from here I think maybe the Seagate is the one I may chose..only not sure yet.

Price range -- middle price range. I don't set a price range -- I just find something I like then buy it -- save for it if I have to

So...help me get started if you can.

SloYerRoll

Okee Dokee then.

Disclaimer:
The products I recommend are things I've had experience with and like. There will likely be other opinions that may very well be better than mine. It's up to you to take the info I/we give you and make up your mind on this stuff.

I recommend the 500GB Western Digital Free Agent Pro . For your needs. I'm pretty sure Dell's don't come w/ Firewire (really fast connection) standard unless you customize your machine and ask for one. If you don't know what firewire is. I can almost guarantee you don't have it. This drive is USB 2.0 (very fast connection). and will sit anywhere on your desk. BTW you'll need an extra electrical plug to run this. It isn't powered through USB.

Here's a decent place to start if you're looking for independent reviews.
or
You can oay the 5.00 a month (and cancel after a few days) and get a subscription for http://consumerreports.org (I highly recommend this resource)

Cost is approximately 130.00 for one. Ultimately I'd like to have two of these sitting on your desktop side by side. but even one level of redundancy is way better than what you have now.

Once you've picked a good external USB (make sure it's USB unless you KNOW you have firewire). We'll move onto getting a program that will synchronize all your files and how to make it work for you.

I promise this will be easier than you think. You've already been through the hard part of this part.

claudermilk

SloYerRoll wrote:

I think the reason Chris is saying don't do that is because it can turn into a jungle of DVD's and you never really know which one you can toss.
I did it for a while then spent one day copying every file on every DVD I had over to my 2nd internal drive, tossed the DVD's and never looked back.

I aslo b/u to an external as well.

My reasons for not using DVDs are threefold:

1) Unreliability. This is the biggie. I have a large pile of disks that I burned about two years ago now. Two copies of each, all bitwise verified & 100% good. Within 18 months they are 100% bad. Using a data recovery program and lots of time allowed me to recover everything, but it was not fun.

2) Space. Like you suspected, yes I also don't like the huge number of volumes generated that must be organized and stored. Also, 4.25GB (what you get after formatting) is just not enough space any more. Even with my 20D RAW files they fill up fast. I cannot imagine trying to archive with the ever-larger files generated (can you imagine trying to archive a 1Ds Mk III's output on DVD? Bleh!).

3) Cost. There is simply no beating the cost per GB of a hard drive. As out image libraries grow, so does the storage requirements, and so does the cost.

For setting up an external, I'd personally check Newegg & get a good empty enclosure & separate OEM drive to fit it. My own solution is to use the 5.25" bays in my desktop with removable trays. The drives behave as internals while in the machine, but can be removed & stored separate from it when not needed. I do sacrifice the ability to throw the drive on any machine, but it's a closed system--and I could get one of those empty enclosures to swap the drives into if need be. So after the inital setup, it's $12 + cost of a drive to expand my storage.

ChrisJ

Do you have eSATA port on your system? If so, I would highly recommend getting en eSATA external enclosure/disk. Speeds will be faster than USB or Firewire. Even if you don't now, your next system probably will.

In my system, I have an operating system disk and a data disk. I purchase my backup external drive to be the same size as my data disk. If I upgrade the internal, then I upgrade the external.

I'm partial to the Seagate disks right now. $150 for a 500 Gig USB/eSATA combo drive from Amazon. $160 for the USB/Firewire/eSATA combo to be REALLY flexible!

Removable trays aren't a bad idea, either. I do like the pure portability of an external disk, though. I can hook it up to any computer any time if necessary without any fiddling.

If you're really paranoid, buy two externals and start storing one at work between backups.

SloYerRoll

All these points are great. But MaryKim (Dogdots) isn't a PC whiz. Let's try to keep her in the world of simple things to do and discuss RAID, eSATA for others.

Not to mention Dell's don't ship w/ Firewire of eSATA unless you request it.

I understand the reasons for eSATA. But once MaryKim does the initial painful (1 or 2 hours of watching her machine do everything) backup. Her backups will be periodical and should only take 5-10 minutes w/ even a USB 1.1 connection.

ChrisJ

SloYerRoll wrote:

I understand the reasons for eSATA. But once MaryKim does the initial painful (1 or 2 hours of watching her machine do everything) backup. Her backups will be periodical and should only take 5-10 minutes w/ even a USB 1.1 connection.

Depends on how much you shoot! Also, if you ever get into digital video (much more common nowadays), it really helps to have that speedier connection for backups.

Understood about keeping it simple... but I'll stand by my hardware recommendations. There's no harm in getting a drive that can handle eSATA, except a few dollars. Even though your message specified Western Digital, the link you supplied is actually for one of the Seagate drives I specified above.

claudermilk

I don't see that eSATA is any more difficult than USB or FireWire--you just have to have a new enough machine to have it. Anyway an external is simple to use--plugin & power up, then wait for the "I found a drive" messages to clear. Done. I'd wait to see if she decides it's too complex or not.

BTW, Newegg has those drives for a few bucks less & I trust them more than the affiliate from Amazon (never hear of them).

dmmattix

claudermilk wrote:

I don't see that eSATA is any more difficult than USB or FireWire--you just have to have a new enough machine to have it. Anyway an external is simple to use--plugin & power up, then wait for the "I found a drive" messages to clear. Done. I'd wait to see if she decides it's too complex or not.
.

The usage is easy. Setting up an eSATA port is less so as they are not nearly as common as USB and Firewire. I suspect that they will be soon but currently you just about have to get a SATA to eSATA kit, hook it into a spare SATA Port (another potential issue), and install the external connector. Not rocket science but not trival to the non-computer internal geeks either.

Of course that's just my opinion I could be wrong..

Mike

Dogdots

I'm going to look at what my system has then we can go from there. I'm finding my CDs and DVDs are a mess...a really big mess in organization...

When I figure out what my system is I will post it.

Thanks everyone for helping me with this

SloYerRoll

SloYerRoll wrote:

Not to mention Dell's don't ship w/ Firewire or eSATA unless you request it.

Sounds like your arguing w/ yourself on this one guys.
Check the Dell site.
This isn't even an option.

Dogdots

SloYerRoll wrote:

All these points are great. But MaryKim (Dogdots) isn't a PC whiz. Let's try to keep her in the world of simple things to do and discuss RAID, eSATA for others.

Not to mention Dell's don't ship w/ Firewire of eSATA unless you request it.

I understand the reasons for eSATA. But once MaryKim does the initial painful (1 or 2 hours of watching her machine do everything) backup. Her backups will be periodical and should only take 5-10 minutes w/ even a USB 1.1 connection.

This is what I found out....my specs say 500GB Serial ATA II?, 7200RPM,M. What ever that means...I understand the 500GB

So where do I go from here?

Art Scott

MaryKim.....
n your burning thread I tild you about Mitsui disks (Mitsui isa brand made by an American company called MAM-A, out of Denver I believe......their best are the gold fiol {Mitsui gold or Mam-A gold}.....) if you are set in stone with the disks for a backup archive then you want the best and that is either the Mam-A (mitsui) orthe Japanese brand mentioned above.....here is what to avoid like the plague in disks.....any disk that is colored in red,blue, green purple, brown etc etc...this is the burning side) as for the gold or silver color of the Mam-A (mitsui) they are a foil not a dye.....dyes will corrupt very quickly....I learned this the hard way and have not found a recovery program to recover over 500 gb of lost photos......if your hard drive does the nasty ear splitting louden screamer {read head actully crashes to the platter beow it) well ican be recovered by at least one company in the US for a cost from $300-2500, as just quoted to me for a 120gb MAXTOR and they cannot give a firm total until I send it in for evaluation.......

My reason for recommending the Mam-A Gold (Mitsui Gold) is due to real world usage of Sony, TDK and Memorex recording media......When I worked for Wichita State as the Performance Faciliteies Manager, we produced thousnads and thousands of CD ofr various performers (from the fledgling freshmans first recital to Dsdisks for pro recording artists) andsome we had to produce on the flay (meaning the artist was aon stage performing and when finished would walk a couple of hundred feet and be handed a labeled finished disk (that was labeled disk and the jewel case was also labeled)....we had so many BAD disks produced by all the NAME BRANDS that thesearch ahd to be done for a brand that we could trust in an on the fly situation (it is extremely embarrasing to hand the leader of the Air Force Jazz Band a disk only to have him stomp into the recording studio with a disk that was corrupt on 5 minutes after handing it to him)......The Mitsui Gold was our choice as it had the best PRO reviews.............

A google for Mitsui Gold produced this LINK.......

Mam-A Home Page............



Some Reasons Why Gold Archiving is the BEST



LIFE EXPECTANTCY OF THE GOLD DISKS..................

As far as Hard drives go.....I have seen them all fail, MAXTOR (the most), Western Digital, Hitachi, and Seagate (the least),.....but fail they do and will........

After 13 yrs in the computer industry......I rely on Seagate, they seem to be the quietest running drive out there....their externals I use are the FREEAGENT PRO series......I also use Seagate internals in my computers....have been buying my Seagates from who ever has the best sale when I need one from EBAY to Best Buy or New EGG or any one else.....I shop for drives when ready to buy a new one.....have had great luck off EBAY all Seage Drives should come with a 5yr warranty, beest in the industry...............

HTH

Dogdots

These sound like good DVD's but spendie, but guess if one wants the best that is the way to go.

I have some important decisions to make

Thanks for the links on the Mam-A....very interesting information.

claudermilk

Dogdots wrote:

This is what I found out....my specs say 500GB Serial ATA II?, 7200RPM,M. What ever that means...I understand the 500GB

So where do I go from here?

You're in luck then. The Serial ATA II means you have SATA II--the new, faster kind. So the system is up to date and you do have the option of an eSATA if you feel like tackling that. I have not personally messed with it myself, but based on setting up my many SATA drives, it ought to be pretty easy. If you don't feel like getting that deep into hardware, just go with a USB external, it should be as easy as plug in & power up.

Dogdots

claudermilk wrote:

You're in luck then. The Serial ATA II means you have SATA II--the new, faster kind. So the system is up to date and you do have the option of an eSATA if you feel like tackling that. I have not personally messed with it myself, but based on setting up my many SATA drives, it ought to be pretty easy. If you don't feel like getting that deep into hardware, just go with a USB external, it should be as easy as plug in & power up.

Maybe you can tell me the difference with an eSATA and SATA. The plug and power up sounds easy