Best backup methodology for numerous CDs

Hello fellow members,

What would you advise when it comes to doing backups of projects that have a very large amount of storage media like 100+ CDRs? In the past I used to burn all cds individually but this is very tedious and time consuming...

I was thinking about DDS tapes or storing everything on a NAS.

I would be happy to hear about your opinions and tips regarding this topic.

Best regards,
---S---

 

I'd go for the NAS, raid5 at least, with another backup just in case. Dump each CD as an image and compress it.

For a cheaper-yet-less-tedious-than-cd alternative you could back it up to Blu-Ray, it'd required much less discs than with CDs (~ 35 times for 25 GB BD-R).
For backups M-Discs are very durable and the blu-ray version is compatible with any decent burner.
I personally add par2 recovery files in case the discs are damaged but it's not mandatory, depends on your paranoia level.


In the long run, NAS is more convenient, but BD-R is cheaper. Ideally you'd do both and keep the BD-Rs elsewhere.

 

Thanks for your answer, BD-R and NAS seem like a good combo, I didn't think about BD-R but you are actually right, it is much more convenient than DDS tapes.

 

+1 for NAS, and very +1 for raid5+ (Losing all data because one hdd fails = not fun). Maybe keep a copy offsite (eg. USB HDD at your parents' place) in case of fire. I wouldn't bother with optical media or tapes - too much hassle, and unless you have dozens of TB of data, the convenience of large HDDs is worth the higher price imho.

If all those CDs are already burned my main concern would be how to get those read back with a minimum of manual work...

 

I use offsite BD-R backups myself on a per-finished-project basis and for the important stuff. I use M-Discs, which are supposed to outlive us mere mortals. It's a supplementary long-term backup. I wouldn't recommend backing up all your NAS this way, only stuff that will not change over time and that you absolutely want to keep forever (e.g. travel photos, archives, etc.).

 

Thanks for your tips gents! They had way more patience back in the days with all those CDs! Unfortunately optical media like this don't age very well, making more up to date backups is crucial. As a matter of fact I had to resurface some cds to extract the data...

 

I use a home made NAS. Just a basic PC with some hard drives running Linux. So more powerful and more features than something like a Synology at a fraction of the price. I used to use parity RAID but with the price of disks so low I switched to mirroring about 10 years ago. It's much easier to manage having everything on one disk you can pull out and slot into another machine.
But this is for archiving the equivalent of thousands of CDRs not hundreds. For 100 you could save multiple copies on a $50 SSD

 

SSD is the worst support for long times backup...

 

Well at least if a SSD dies you know that all of the data is fucking gone forever, no need to worry about finding a data recovery specialist that could transplant platters or other things like that that you could have tried with a HDD.

I have to admit, though, that I don't know how SSDs fare with long shelf times. For example, how often (if at all) do their memory cells need to be refreshed? Any studies on that?