Worth Backing Up to DVD Data ROM?
Over the years, I have from time to time made a backup of my personal documents to CD ROM. Once only a few disks total, I now have almost 30 CD ROMs and it's getting to the point where it's unwieldy and a general pain in the rear end to carry around. As well, there is some info on some of them I'd like to erase for good and so I've been planning to re-back them up to CD ROM for quite awhile now. But here's the thing. I have access to a SuperDrive enabled Mac with Toast Titanium 5. For what I understand, I can back up about 4.6 gigs of data to each one of those DVD discs, and I'll be able to read it on any machine with a DVD reader/combo drive. Sounds good to me! But here's the thing I noticed - DVD ROM drives, even on current iBook, eMac and TiBook machines, are only 8x read. Which means it'll be painfully slow to load up stuff from the archives. Of course, that's why they're archives, because they are rarely accessed. But I'm curious to know what others think (especially if they have thought this backup decision before). Is it worthwhile to back up to DVD Data ROM instead of CD ROM to gain the advantage of larger discs despite the slower access? I'm sure at some point the DVD reader drives will get much faster, but I'd be curious to know what others think.
Comments
<strong>I'm sure at some point the DVD reader drives will get much faster, but I'd be curious to know what others think.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I had a [potentially] bad problem with a similar situation. I have an external DVD burner, although it's just a "superdrive" in a firewire case. I backed up data on 3 discs before formatting my harddrive. Once done, my combo drive flat panel iMac's combo drive couldn't read the DVDs. Luckily I own the DVD burner and that drive COULD read the discs, but I'm now wary of the combo or super drives (jack of all/ace of none).
So if you're going to try, burn a full DVD first and test it out on your particular machine....
[ 09-20-2002: Message edited by: bunge ]</p>
DVDs are encoded at a much higher bit rate. But it's a variable bit rate, ranging from 500 kilobytes per second to over 1000 kilobytes per second. So a 1x DVD-ROM drive will read data at 500-1000 kilobytes per second, and an 8x DVD-ROM will read data at 4MB-8MB per second. However, I don't know the exact bitrate that is used as a baseline or a reference for determining read speed of DVD-ROMs.
So your combo drive, which is 8x DVD-ROM read and 24x CD read will read data at 4-8MB and 3.5MB, respectively.
<strong> I have access to a SuperDrive enabled Mac with Toast Titanium 5. For what I understand, I can back up about 4.6 gigs of data to each one of those DVD discs, and I'll be able to read it on any machine with a DVD reader/combo drive. Sounds good to me! </strong><hr></blockquote>
And if you damage a DVD, you've lost 4.6 gigs of data. I prefer not to have all my eggs in the same basket. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
<strong>So a 1x DVD-ROM drive will read data at 500-1000 kilobytes per second, and an 8x DVD-ROM will read data at 4MB-8MB per second. However, I don't know the exact bitrate that is used as a baseline or a reference for determining read speed of DVD-ROMs.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The baseline for DVDs is approximately 1.2 MB/sec (9.8 Mb/s).
For CDs, the exact datarate of the audio tracks is 176.4 KB/s. However, the canonical datarate for expressing the speed multiples is based on 150 KB/s.
(edit: added CD speeds)
[ 09-21-2002: Message edited by: King Chung Huang ]</p>
<strong>And if you damage a DVD, you've lost 4.6 gigs of data. I prefer not to have all my eggs in the same basket. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
So you make two and put one in a safe place where you know you're not going to bugger it up. Pretty standard backup procedure. :cool:
ALWAYS make two (or maybe more) backup discs!