Wide World of Women

I don't mean to insult the intelligence of members of this group; but please back up your DVD and CD disks.

I am in the process of going through the hundreds of DVD and CD disks and discarding stuff I no longer want or need. I am finding that many of the disks are not accesable or I get a " cyclic redundancy check error "

I use a program called Y COPY which is some cases can extract some of the videos/images from the disks.

I don't know if it is the quality/brand of disk or the disk burners or the disk burner program that is the cause but in any case Please back up your disks

This might sound crazy but I am going to back up my home videos and photos not only on an external Hd but on VHS tapes as well . I have tapes from the "BETA" years that still play with excellent quality considering the equipment available at that time.

I have had internal and external Hard Drives crash and lost everything . I have had disks explode in an external DVD player and lost the DVD and player . A VHS backup makes sense to me because I feel its as close to a hard copy as your gonna find .

Just my $.02 worth

Loneranger

Don't feel as if you're insulting anyone, LR. It seems like simple advice, but it's something you never follow until it's too late.

I had posted in this forum a while ago about a new external drive that I bought that seemingly went kaput after about a week. All the home shopping caps I had downloaded in 2007 were on there and I didn't have any other copies of it, erasing them off my iMac's hard drive after the transfer. Luckily, it was only a faulty power supply, but I might not be so fortunate next time. Now virtually everything I put on the external drive also gets burned to disc. An ounce of prevention, right? I ended up preaching the same advice you just did.

And hey, the good thing about VHS is that a huge black tape is not as easy to lose as CD or DVD, and it'll only get destroyed by an ornery VCR.

Good advice.

When you back up your data to discs make sure the write setting is at a slow speed, and always check your discs after burning to make sure your data is on there. It can be painful to back up a bunch of data at 2x speed, but not as painful as losing your vids and finding out the links you've uploaded have expired.

Nothing is fool proof, but it's unlikely you will lose data if you have it on 2 sources. So if a DVD is the only place you have something, make sure to make a copy of it if it's something you value.

Another thing.
Don't try recording with the same disc on 2 different recorders.I had recorded something with one recorder,had got another recorder.Thought i would use up the space that was on that disk.It wiped out both recordings.
This what i lost.Can't remember who posted the clips that these came from.

thanks for advice from all. "stuff" I never thought of doing

Loneranger

I agree with laker on this one. I have had recorded with an earlier DVD recorder which subsequently died and now my current DVD recorder program lets me know that it can't read the previous recording because it was done on a different DVD recorder.

My biggest hint if I don't get a message is that if the files on the DVD don't show up when adding new files, then it is time to copy those files to the HD and burn a new DVD with everything. If I don't do that, then the old files are GONE!

I am currently keeping my stuff on external drives. I will edit and cap on my computer. Then I keep a copy on my computer and one on my external hard drive. The only time I have the external hard drive hooked up and powered on is when I go to back up files. Once that is done I disconnect and unplug my external drive. Am I still safe using this method?

The possibility of both your computer and the hard drive failing seems somewhat remote. Are you using the safe removal feature (xp) . An external hard drive can be "FRIED" just like a sd card or a memory stick if connection is not shut down properly . Also a virus creeping into both your computer and hard drive is also remote but I'm told not impossible.

My concern was (from experience) that none of the electronic devices ( hard rive or cd/dvds are completely impervious to failure. I was suggesting that if you have irreplaceable videos/photo (home movies etc) that they also be put on a vhs tape ( if one is available and you have the equipment to do it)

Again I have tapes from the "BETAMAX" days and they all play fine considering the equipment available at the time. Even if the tape should break they can be fixed (scotch tape) and only a small amount of info is lost.

Loneranger

Oh, a note with using vhs/beta (magnetic) tapes. The quality will degrade over time, and the video turns reddish the older it gets.

edit-it's actually film that turns reddish NOT magnetic tapes. The average life expectancy of VHS tape is roughly 10yrs.

i peronally write all my discs @ 2X,this usually stops the CRC errors,but not always,it takes longer but 99% of the discs i write are accessable without CRC errors,AVOID burning @ 16X,this is the biggest cause of CRC errors i know,burn @ a minimum of 4X IMO

Thanks for the feedback. If I could find a Beta player and blank tapes for that I would do it in a heartbeat. Always prefered Beta over VHS.