5/28 A year ago I backed up my home dir onto a CD-R. Afterwards I tried it
on a regular CD-ROM and all the files seems ok. Now when I try to
access it it complains about a corrupted directory structure? What
could cause this to happen? Bad CD writer or bad disk? And is there
a way to recover from this? Thanks.
\_ If you backed it up on a CD you must not have cared about it. I
suggest you ditch the coaster and move on with your life.
\_ CD-R's are fairly reliable, certainly more so than most tape
media. What do you do your backups on, troll? They are
susceptible to scratching, particularly if you write on the top
surface with a ball-point. They can also theoretically degrade
over time, but they still should be better than most tapes.
Have you tried it in different drives? Sometimes a particular
drive and a particular CD won't get along because of vibration
or other issues. -tom
\_ The other major problem with CDRs is that they are
exteremely sensitive to any sort of light. You can't
leave them lying around exposed to overhead light
or sunlight and then expect that they will work.
If you need reliable backups, I would suggest MO
or a external harddrive.
\_ hard drives are many orders of magnitude less
reliable than CD's, even CD-R's. -tom
\_ An unpowered external hardrive will last
years as compared to the life of the ave.
cdr which is less than a few months. MO
is the way to go if you *really* care about
your data.
\_ MO is good (and recordable DVD is a
successor to MO, not to CD-R). But CD-R
is pretty damn reliable; manufacturer
claims are for 75 years, and I've never
had a burned disk go bad on me. Burning
failure rates are fairly high, but that's
not a longevity issue. -tom
\_ I'll bet you burn your CDRs and then
put them in a cool dark place unlike
above poster.
\_ The back seat of my car in the
parking lot doesn't count?!?!
\_ Would you trust your data to one burn on a CD or the
typical 0/5/9 tape cycle where your data is likely to hit
tape multiple times and probably get a copy stored off
site? I'll keep my stuff on tape, thanks. It's easier to
manage, holds more, and less likely to result in a motd
post about "how do i get my stuff off this fucked up tape?"
Maybe you can explain why tapes are still in use if CDs
make superior backup media? Everyone else must just be
stupid, huh? In this case, he might get lucky and find out
it's just a CD device incompatibility issue, but then
again, maybe not. I prefer to avoid "luck" with my data.
\_ The issue of the reliability of the media is
completely irrelevant to whether there's more than one
copy--you can do 0/5/9 with CD, too. Are you really
doing multiple-level tape backups with off-site storage
for files on your home machine? Of course not, you're
just trolling. And I didn't say CD's make superior
backup media, I said they're more reliable than tape.
The limited size makes CD not useful as backup for
shared filesystems. -tom
\_ More than one copy *is* important. No one cares about
media reliability so much as they do about getting
their data back. If one media type is slightly more
reliable than another but I have 6 copies on the
lesser media type, my odds of getting my data back are
better with the 6 copies on lesser media. Tell me
you've got 3+ copies of each CDR?
\_ He didn't say it was a home machine. He said it was
a "home dir" which is an entirely different matter.
And yes, it's easier to do 0/5/9 with tape than CD.
No, I don't do any backups for home, per se. Files I
want to keep get tgz'd and copied to work where I do
incrementals/fulls/offsite. But, oh yes, I forgot,
anyone who disagree with tom is automatically a troll.
\_ Interesting... what media do you recommend for backup
of a home system? (FWIW, right now my main strategy
is rsync of what I care about to several computers.)
--Galen
\_ the vast majority of home users don't do backups at
all, so if you're doing anything you're ahead of
the game. I use CD's but if you have another
system that's probably fine too. I just think
the first response was horribly ignorant. -tom
\_ He never said it was a home system. Read it.
\_ Dude, guys, is all that porn really worth the backup?
\_ hell yeah. building up a good pr0n collection takes a
lot of time and effort.
\_ I'm with Tom on this one. -ausman
\_ Yup, that settles it. This from the guy who has
trouble reading a dictionary and projects this
reading problem on others. With friends like that..
\_ "To all the gossips and the liars, I will see
see you in the fires." -J. Cash |
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