hi, i have bought brand names cds,dvds sony..memorex etc.. all have gone bad on me.i started buying generic disks<no brand name> 50 cd's for 11 bucks and dvd's 50 for 16 bucks and have yet to have a problem with them.<crosses finger> and i hope they dont crap out on me but for the year i have been using them no problems as of yet. keltik

0

I'm confused... I have a cheap CD burner, but I use Memorex CDR's (mainly because they're also cheap when on sale, and I have several laptop CD-ROM's that are somewhat temperamental about reading burned CD's, but they seem to be able to read Memorex with no problems.) I have NEVER lost any data that I burned to a CDR. Hard drives will fail eventually. That is an undisputable fact. They have motors & bearings & such, which will NOT last forever. CD's (properly stored) will last indefinitely. Subjected to extreme heat, prolonged humidity, or the dog's teeth, they will, of course, fail, but barring this type of abuse, they are reliable storage devices. If the various posters here are losing anywhere from 3% to 44% of their data, I would look to the hardware, rather than the media. Possibly a dirty or damaged/faulty CD player? Peanut butter fingerprints on the media? Just my 2 cents worth. HTH Dave If Wile Coyote had enough money for all that Acme crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?

0

Hi peter. My point exactly. A backup hard drive is the way that is best. But can you store 300 dvd's and around 200 cd's to this external drive? I wouldn't think so. And Also, without compressing all that data, it would be more impossible to store. Would you spend twice the money for that much media? For me buying That many duplicates is not an option. A few posts ago, I said I downloaded a tune for the sole purpose of listening to it. Without going into the technicalities of that post, it seems the safest way to watch/listen to your fave films/tunes would be to download it. I would agree to downloading media that you have a licence for, therefore excuding you from copyright theft. It would certainly get rid of all my cd's/dvd's lol. So my point still stands I think. But also opens a good/contriversal opinion. It would be a great idea to purchase a licence, then download/stream that media as and when you wish to use it. It's the breach of copyright that will hang over our heads forever, and make this sensible way of getting what we want feasable.

0

200 cd's was meant to be 2000 cd's. sowiiiiii. Dave, If you purchase a high;y respected and well rated storage device, then you wouldn't expect your back ups to fail. The reason i backed up my media, was to prevent the... what you said.."CD's (properly stored) will last indefinitely. Subjected to extreme heat, prolonged humidity, or the dog's teeth, they will, of course, fail, but barring this type of abuse...." I have children. They break stuff. They even find a way into a place they're not supposed to be, and are clever enough to do these things without your knowlege. I have dvd's that took me years to find. But i also don't want to pack it, wrap it, lock it, completely seal it from everyone in order to make sure i keep it safe. My reason for watching or listening to backups. I feel this topic would last a while, but still the end result is the same..... Our Media can never be kept for as long we would like.

0

Being a person who doensn't like to read everything.. I have noticed a few thing. I guess my question is..... How in the world do you get 2800 gigs of infomation to backup? Junk Internet Explorer, Get Firefox! You'll be happy you did.

0

yodadude1, I understand your point, but as I said, eventually a harddrive WILL fail, so be redundant...back everything up to 2 harddrives if a HD is your only method of backup. If your kids decide to play frisbee with a CD, you've lost 700 Megabytes. When (not IF) the HD fails, you've lost hundreds of Gigabytes. I have harddrives that are 8-10 years old that still perform flawlessly, but I know that they will eventually fail. How many posts have you seen here that begin... >Help!!! My 1 year old computer just had it's harddrive fail for the second time... HTH Dave If Wile Coyote had enough money for all that Acme crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?

0

Agree with Dave, I've said it many times to everyone I know with a computer. It's not IF a hard drive fails it's WHEN. Another tip would be to check your back-up hard drives periodically, so that when the main drive goes you don't discover to late that the back-up drive has gone previously.

0

A cd or dvd screws up and you have lost one or two pieces of media. A HD screws up and you have lost it ALL. The less of the 2 evils seem clear to me.

0