Kit's Blog

Backup Obsession

     So, as a general rule as a programmer, it's always been my philosophy to want to back everything up twice. Why? Simply because chances are that sooner or later, something you'll want to undo will happen, and that backup will come in handy. But what has been concerning me much more recently is that the integrity of my CDs and DVDs (games, music, and whatnot) has been failing recently. It's not so much that I'm storing them badly or anything, but that they are used too frequently, with sometimes good and sometimes failing equipment. So far, I know that my #2 CD for Starship Titanic is broken beyond repair, my Daft Punk: Discovery CD has two points that when I attempted to rip had skips, and my Amplitude (PS2 Game DVD) has a strange looking mark on the cover that makes me think that if I don't make a copy at some point the cover will tear off in some way. So recently I've become midly obsessed with the idea of saving all the crap I have. Suffice to say I've picked up a goodly amount over the years, and that it won't fit onto a reasonable number of CDs (somewhere in the range of 400 burnable 80 minute CDs to back up just what I have on my hard drives), DVDs (somewhere in the range of 65 single layer DVDs), or even Dual layer DVDs (33 Dual layer DVD+Rs). And this doesn't change the general problem that I honestly don't want to make static backups (backups that I can only change once) anyway.
     And this doesn't even include my games for PS1, PS2, and gamecube or my CDs and DVDs. Unfortunately, I couldn't back up some of these things even if I wanted to, simply because of limitations on the media (namely gamecube games and issues with FADE-protected games, and a need for a modchip). And all of this falls apart anyway when you realize that burnable media's lifetime isn't really known, mainly because media "rot," where water comes in contact with the reflective layer mainly due to cheap manufacturing processes and materials used to drive prices down. Though the estimated lifetime is between 25 and 100 years, this rot has been known to become a problem in as little as two years. If you'd like to, you can read more about it here. Basically, I want a really nice tape backup. Unfortunately to get one around the size that I need it could cost upwards of $200, and the tapes themselves would probably cost a pretty penny too. This also would not solve the problem of backing up CDs and DVDs, though I may just want to get an application like CloneCD and just make "perfect" iso's which could be stored on the tape for later use. Either way, I feel like I'm going to lose a lot of my stuff if I don't start backing it up in one way or another.