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Has your data been saved?

2003-12-01 22:19:49.211795+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

My laptop is out of disk space. 38 meg 16 bit TIFFs from the Canon D60[Wiki] are taking their toll. But even aside from that, the thousands of images shot with the small camera are also looking for space (and yes, the snippet manager[Wiki] is starting to take shape), the colo box is rapidly filling, and I want two copies of everything.

So while I should probably coordinate with someone to automate some off-site replication from my house server, I also need to ponder:

  1. Does anyone out there have experience with FireWire hard disks and Linux? This would be an easy way to give me extra portable storage for the laptop, handy on treks like the one we just took.
  2. Does anyone know about archival CD-R blanks? A good source for the long-term gold based ones like Kodak[Wiki] uses for PhotoCD[Wiki] disks and claims are good for a century or so if stored reasonably?

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Archival ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Has your data been saved? made: 2003-12-01 22:48:51.184396+00 by: ccoryell

Hey if you find a good source for archival cds let the blog know, I am in the market as well.

#Comment Re: Has your data been saved? made: 2003-12-01 23:31:46.553514+00 by: Dan Lyke

Some days you manage to find the right search terms: Looks like Verbatim DataLifePlus CD-R blanks are claiming 100 year archival life.

#Comment Re: Has your data been saved? made: 2003-12-01 23:34:24.119067+00 by: Dan Lyke

Crap, except that this thread has a few reports of failures.

#Comment Re: Has your data been saved? made: 2003-12-01 23:55:49.16587+00 by: meuon

I bought a 120mb external firewire drive for my laptop just before the last 'burn just for image storage. It's been fantastic under Linux and Winders. Linux see's it as a SCSI device.. ie: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt works just fine. I also bought a firewire DVD/CD writer which also works under Linux. I have not burned a DVD under Linux yet.. but the CD burns great under xCDROAST or the desktop Gnome burner.

#Comment Re: Has your data been saved? made: 2003-12-06 02:06:50.438264+00 by: scm

Firewire drives are a bit kludgy with the 2.4 Linux series. It works well enough, but you have to manually tell the system to look for the drive. Other than the hassle, eveything seems to work fine. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to smooth things out, but I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet. The biggest problem I've seen so far is that almost no laptops (outside of those made by Apple) offer powered firewire ports which makes those nice portable bus powered drives next to useless.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-02-07 17:21:34.049974+00 by: Dan Lyke

Since this is one of my most emailed threads, I thought I should point to this /. article which points to an NIST study on archivable recordable media and has comments that give some sources for phthalocyanine dye based CD-Rs. Reproduced here: