I have indexed about 20 discs so far. It takes longer than I was expecting...obviously taking more time for DVDs and lots of file discs + ones that it can grab some contents (like MP3s and TXT files). I probably have another 40 or so.
I'm finding several copies of old DVDs that I burnt too many copies for. Trying to decide what to do with them. Should I keep them as the ultimate backup (many copies) or get rid of them? I have a disc destroyer that I run all discs I get rid of through (several times) so if I do get rid of them, I wouldn't ever be able to retrieve the contents. Part of me thinks keeping them is the best choice but I really want to down size and take my current backups and essentially archive archive them and almost start over. I want to go through the past years of backups and find that really is important and needs backup offsite. I take lots of web site work I do and archive it but that kind of stuff (that I've spent hundreds of hours creating) I never want to get rid of or lose. So in that case I want two copies (one being offsite).
Essentially right now if the worst were to happen, I have basically all data backed up to hard drive (outside of gigantic movie files that I own the originals to). The biggest complaint is my optical backups. Restoring from my backup hard drives would likely be a piece of cake. Just copy all the files over and I have everything. Of course it's good to have a few copies. So if the worst case happened twice and I lost both my main and backup drives, well, I have the most important stuff backed up. But I would have to spend hours figuring out what is the most recent backup data. I don't even have the discs in chronological order! Somehow they got mixed around. I usually wrote the date, though. I need a system to follow.
Of course with DVDs, I can't back too much up, either! Maybe digital photos and documents if I don't include large media files. Music couldn't be backed up.
When I decide to backup pictures, I usually go through and back them all up. This is a huge mistake, though, because as you can see, I can quickly start wasting tens of discs because a complete backup now takes about 11 DVDs. Oh how all that data would fit nicely on a single Blu-Ray! Of course it's more than 3 times the price for media + $400+ for the drive. I could backup my music on 7 Blu-Ray (DL of course). 50GB is sort of the minimum for a mass backup medium. It's the point where you really start getting some stuff--a couple hours of SD or compressed HD miniDV, tens of thousands of pictures, and even a lot of FLAC! 150 CDs per Blu-Ray. So if not FLAC, about 300 times the storage capacity (of course CDs are rarely full).
Author
Topic: Indexing Offline Backups (Read 3405 times)