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What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator?
zachjb asks: "With all of the recent articles and buzz in the technology community regarding recordable/pressed optical disks being an unreliable medium to backup your data on, I figured the best way to keep my data alive is to duplicate my CDs/DVDs every few years. I've searched Froogle for CD/DVD duplicators, but I have no idea what I should be looking for. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a lot experience with this type of equipment? Is this a reasonable solution to the problem or is there a more cost effective one?"
For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.
There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.
If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.
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For a good few years I've stuck with Plextor products for my CD-R/RW drives. They've been dependable and I've never had a problem with them. I have an old 12x SCSI burner in one of my systems that hasn't made a single hiccup in 4 years. I don't think it's made a single coaster, and that was before they had buffer underrun protection. Their DVD burners are most likely just as good, if that's your cup up fea. I highly recommend them. -Yoweigh
Definitely _way_ under $100. I picked up my 52x24x52 CD-RW for $0. And guess how much the 100-CD spindles cost? You guessed it. Free.
It pays to look at local ads, those two deals come up pretty frequently at places like OfficeMax, CompUSA, and Staples.
Personally, though, I'd go for a pseudo-RAID type setup. Just back up all your files to several computers at once, if one fails then you have several complete backups, one of which you can respawn onto the failed machine. And it's more convenient (and faster) to update than CD archives. No possibility of losses either, it's known that doing stuff like raw-copying CDs several times (a la CloneCD) can cause errors. If you MD5-sum everything then you'll catch any kind of error that could be introduced in copying files back and forth.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
I tend to make lots of CDR backups, so about once a year I like to create a directory of the "best stuff" on backup CDRs, then burn this directory to 2 new CDRs - this helps avoid bit-rot and gives me an additional optimized backup set where it is easier to find stuff. I like to also occasionally store these newer backups at relative's houses (off site backup :-)
Anyway, this may sound like a nuisance to do, but this scheme works for me.
-Mark
We use a 7x duplicator for our under 500 jobs. Anything more and we usually send it off. A glass master press is too expensive for small jobs like that.
The thing has paid for itself a hundred times over - the markup on CDs is amazing, and with the demand for small runs we make a tidy side profit from our normal business. The duplicator sits on our multimedia developer's desk and he can run about 500 almost unconsciously.
Man, I sound like a magazine testimonial.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_slc.asp?CatId=92.
Get a MO drive. The space is limited on the discs, they're expensive, and they require SCSI, but you can't argue with an archival lifespan of 100 years.
What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.
You mean something like this?
look, if you have any more than a few hundred disks total, do what others are recommending and find some sort of hard drive storage system: raid, a couple of external usb drives, whatever.
but, even though i have cd and dvd burners in my computers, it is really quite useful to have a cheap, single disk duplicator handy. i have one i bought a few years back, at a target store (a discount store), no less.
something like this. that's ony $150, similar to what i paid. its very useful to not have to tie up my machine when i'm running some quick copies.
and, they are so dead-simple to use, your non-computer literate friends and family can do it themselves. for example, my mom can't use a computer to save her life, but she owns a single disk duplicator and can use it without my help.
It's going to be way too expensive to shell out for the sort of equipment you're looking for.
Instead of running a complete backup every few years, why don't you do a rolling backup...say half a dozen copies a week, toss out the old copies and copy the next half a dozen from your collection the next week and so on. You'll still have a backup every few years, it's just that you're not doing the whole thing at once.
- Make two or three copies of everything you REALLY want to keep (don't get lazy and save everything, show a bit of judgment.)
- Figure out some sort of indexing strategy so you can find stuff later. Don't get all fancy, consider portable like a flat text file listing materials and what CDs they're on.
- Keep one set someplace convenient, but fairly well secured, temperature controlled, not damp, etc. Send off the other copies to elsewhere under like conditions.
- Once a year check all the caches of materials and test-read some samples. Take the opportunity to add what's new, update the indexes, etc.
- Every n-years send the whole lot out for duplication to whatever is the format du jure. Don't get stuck with punch cards / paper tape / reel to reel magtapes / laser disks / IBM PC to cassette tape / Bournelli disks / magneto-optical / and soon CDs, keep up with the times.
Face it, CDR production is already winding down as industry prepares to move to DVDR. A few years after that it'll be ???. Don't get locked in to any of those, instead spend your effort on keeping your files in portable formats, searchable, and secure. Mediums will come and go, bits can be forever.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Mitsui claims that their new dye formulation for their DVD-R and DVD+R blanks has a >100 year life, but they don't offer any independent information to back that up.
This is just plain wrong. There is a big difference between data CD's and audio CD's.
Your statement is essentially correct for data CD's. However, for audio, the parent's statements are correct, you must use a tool like EAC to get an exact copy.
With audio, the drive does all of the error checking and correcting. Uncorrectable, or C2 errors, can not be corrected, and occur on almost every CD. When a C2 error is encountered by the drive, it extrapolates (yes, guesses) the data and provides this data to the PC. You can't hear it (probably), but those errors do accumulate.
Most importantly, those errors, however slight, prevent you from doing a digital compare of the dupe back to the master.
BTW, IAAPD (I Am A Professional Duplicator).
"...or if you do, put a label on the non-write side to help keep the surface from flaking off."
Not necessarily a good idea. A previous article on this subject mentioned that the glue on some labels can cause the CD to degrade more quickly.