Here to plug SpinRite for the health of your backups
I have 5-1/4" floppies from the mid 80’s that still work.
Currently ripping all episodes of The Twilight Zone from the box set.
What’s a good medium to back up to, assuming I don’t want to pay for a RAID setup?
You can set up a pretty robust backup system for pretty cheap if you already have the drives, and the knowledge to set it up yourself. I have two always on devices, an NAS that is my central location for important files, which syncs to a backup device with two hard drives that are synced at different intervals. If a drive fails, it gets replaced, and I haven’t lost the core of my backups, I might lose some incremental backups, but it’s more important to me that I have 3 copies available on different drives. 2 are in one location, the third in a separate location and my syncs are each an interation behind, so if there’s a huge screw up, it’ll take three sync cycles before the main copies are lost (not including the incremental backups I also keep).
This setup allows you to replace drives as they fail so you can constantly update with technologies and don’t need to worry about what’s the best medium.
AFAIK this doesn’t apply to “pocked” CDs/dvds made from a manufacturer. If you burned writable/rewritable it can rot.
Some manufactured DVDs can go bad too.
Someone recently told me about a RAID configuration that can mitigate bit rot but it was a long conversation and I forgot a lot of what they said. I’m currently in the planning stages of setting up my first NAS so if anybody could point me in the right direction that would be pretty sweet.
What the hell is RAID and NAS ? I have a bad ass DvD collection to the tune of 3k films ( no pineapple express bull shit ) that I’ve been wanting to back up. I don’t know shit about computers but have a 2014 MacBook pro with a disk drive that has never been online just used to watch movies when the power is out and to load my cd collection to mp3 players.
Help me out here !!!
