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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?"
It's pointless to invest a lot in it now, unless you already have a lot of disks that are getting over 5 or 6 years old.
If you are just thinking about the future, you might as well just wait until the next big thing is out and the copy them when that time comes.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Seriously is the author daft? If you're only duplicating your disks every few years then I've got news for you -- a second 24x or faster CD-writer costs under a hundred bucks! And every CD burning program out there supports disk duplication.
Seriously, even if it takes a couple days I don't understand why you need a machine dedicated to disk duplication if you re-burn your backups only every two or three years. Or perhaps are you looking for advice on disk pirating devices and you used a recent (and duplicate) /. article as an excuse to slip under the radar?
RAID != backup though.
Malicious programs, accidental rm -rf... filesystem corruption.. bugs..
Set up some rsync backups for your data to multiple separate systems, with at least one offsite.
You can do rsync-incremental backups too if you want a really good backup solution. Rdiff -backup uses similar ideas too, but the simlipcity of rsync-incrementals can't be beat.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Too many variables. Some can print the CD after burning it. (Print the CD, not apply a label which is a bad idea) Some are completely automated, just stick a stack in, hit run, and come back latter to a stack of burned CDs. Some are faster than others.
If your quantities are large enough you will find that pressing the disks just like the big music guys to is cheapest. Unless you are really really big this is an outsourced operation. Even if pressing doesn't make sense, it might make sense to outsource to someone who can do it for you.
For dirt cheap it is hard to beat turning an old PC with a burner into your station.
Start by defining your needs. Do you need labels? How many do you need, over what time period? How often are you likely to change what is on the CD? How cheap is labor in your area? How much human attention can you afford to give each burn? What will you be doing after the burn is done?
The answers will define what you need in a solution. They may even define the divide between burning in house and outsourcing.
I personally have over 1000 audio CDs, 800 DVDs, and another 1500 or so archive CDs (patch downloads, dev kits, work backups, etc.)
Having played CD monkey just reading a few of the audio CDs, I can't imagine trying to duplicate the whole set by hand.
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.
I do know that you can expect to pay a few grand for such a setup. I know one fellow who set up a drive tower with 6 CD readers just to load his audio collection into MP3's for his player.
While most people consider a couple hundred disks a "collection", there are plenty of us media junkies who've actually own thousands of legal media.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Being a former DJ (using CDs), I never understood the beauty of units that you could just plug in, and copy cd to cd (ala CD Duplicator). The one caveat I list to this, is that they are overpriced, and often times run more than $300. But none the less, one day while DJing, I had a DJ from another club (same owners, different locations) come in, and show me some of his new CDs, and showed me what was really hot and so on. In an instant, he went to his car, grabed his duplicator, and some CD-Rs and burnt me copies, real quick like. It was beautiful to have an on-site on-location CD duplication. If I could have afforded the equipment, I would have bought one myself (even after seeing the somewhat rediculous prices of the equipment).
CD Duplicators can come in real handy, in situations you wouldn't believe!
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
You don't even have to waste the disk--just mount the image using daemontools or equivalent.
A comment about Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is modded redundant. rolloffle!
How in the fuck is the parent post Offtopic? It CLEARLY links to a webiste displaying various CD/DVD Duplicators.
--Get real, man. Just because a hash collision was found doesn't mean that "md5 sucks now." In order to generate that hash collision, do you know how many computers it took, and how many processing hours? It's perfectly acceptable for checking ISO integrity, and it's a LOT faster than SHA1.
--Reiserfs can have hash collisions too (if you have umpteen-thousands of files in a single directory) but that doesn't stop me from using it.
Here's an example:
tmpfile="this is a test"
md5sum tmpfile
e19c1283c925b3206685ff522acfe3e6 tmpfile
--Now I'll change 1 byte:
tmpfile="this is a tost"
md5sum tmpfile
499d6c0dcb94feb57d983b58d344a400 tmpfile
--Notice that? The md5sum is now COMPLETELY DIFFERENT due to 1 byte being changed. Good enough for me - especially when the ISO's I download are mostly compressed (Knoppix, Mepis, etc.)
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
So yes, if you want to talk about decade-old hardware, I did indeed err. I probably should have also said, in my list of ways-such-errors-could-occur, "if you use ancient noname drives"
Bzzzt. Wrong again. These problems were certainly NOT solved "decades ago" The CD-ROM was only invented in 1984. I've had sync problems as late as 1997 or 98. It wasn't on no-name hardware either. I've personally seen on on Mitsumi drives, Lite-On drives, Apple drives, etc. It's a VERY common problem. Yes, if you buy quality hardware you have a mimimum chance of sync errors happening. No, not everyone buys quality hardware. The point is that if you're copying 1000 CDs for backup purposes it's a much better idea to use proven program like EAC to do the job perfectly every time.
AccountKiller
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