Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Personally, I think the best long term storage for a Slashdot reader would to be to build a home RAID server. Hard drives fail, but they rarely fail all at once. That's why a designed-for-redundancy RAID is perfect for this situation.
You don't really need to be concerned about hot-swapping, because you can afford your pictures being unavailable for the hour or so while you're swapping out a failed HD every few years.
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?
I don't trust offline storage - bitrot is real.
I've decided that I'm going to keep all my data in online storage - the hard drives in my server. It's backed up (to an external USB2 hard drive) and I'm not going to lose it or find that I can't read it in five years.
Drive storage is cheap, simple and it works.
"but I have no idea what I should be looking for."
A printer.
In fact, I think a set-top style box (though still a rather big one, at least now) could be built to do exactly what consumers need. And with increasing Internet bandwidths, it would be really cool if you could buy a movie with your remote control and have it delivered and stored on your system at home. If only the big few could get past their DRM-inducing fears and offer a reasonable way for consumers to do this. I believe that if this were offered with music, back when the whole Napster thing started, downloading stuff for free might have been a fringe weird geek sort of activity, because most reasonable people would have an easy way to get perfect recordings every time for a small payment. Hopefully the movie industry won't be so blind to this gaping wide business opportunity as to cause themselves the same problem, and eventually ruin technology for everyone by making it decide what we are and aren't allowed to do.
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.
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
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.
I had a former roommate who brought a nice but flea infested leather couch into my house.
My legs are crack for fleas.
Before calling an exterminator, I flea bombed the house with those flea/insect foggers. Several CDs that I left out were covered in a haze that made them unusable. The purchased audio CDs did not have the printed surface compromised but the silver computer CD-ROMs had the silver peel off.
I was able to use chrome polish (Welon) and a towel to restore the Music CDs so I could rip them but the Burned CDs were gone for good.
Be warned if you ever flea bomb your house and leave CDs out. And be careful with your choice of roommates.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Snapshot This!
A snapshot is a freeze-frame image of your computer's hard drive. The location and contents of every file are noted in an instant, and then the computer continues with its work. Making a snapshot is like making an instant backup of the hard disk to the same drive.
Not every operating system supports snapshots, but the feature is becoming more popular. It was recently introduced in FreeBSD 5.0, for instance, although it wasn't really reliable until the 5.2 version. Snapshots have been a part of NetApp's gFiler appliances and EMC's storage systems for years.
The advantage of the snapshot is that it can be made very fast and it takes up hardly any disk space at all. That's because snapshots are implemented with a technique called "copy on write." Basically, the operating system makes a map that notes the name and contents of every file. If an application tries to overwrite one of these files after the snapshot is made, the operating system writes the new file contents to an unused location of the hard drive and preserves the original contents.
The same thing is done with directories. If you try to delete a file inside a directory, the computer actually writes a second directory onto the disk that doesn't have the file you just deleted. If you want to get back a file after you've accidentally deleted it, you just retrieve it from the snapshot.
On my primary server, for instance, I have a program that makes a snapshot every night at 11 p.m. I keep these snapshots for seven days, then they are automatically deleted.
The disadvantage of snapshots is that deleting a file doesn't actually free up space on the disk-the blocks remain "used" until every snapshot that references the file is deleted too. And, of course, snapshots don't protect you against a hardware failure or somebody accidentally formatting the hard drive.
One last thing: Once you have your backup system in place, you should practice trying to restore a backup from time-to-time. The best way to do this is to take a brand-new computer and a set of your backup tapes, and see if you can restore a 100 percent working system. Many organizations can't, so don't overlook this important test.
:P
My blog
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
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_slc.asp?CatId=92.
What you should be looking for is a CD/DVD duplicator that's based on RIAA math.... You know, ones that "run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x...," ones that are "well above the average speed." That way, your duplicator will be the equivalent of 421 burners.
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
"copy on write." Basically, the operating system makes a map that notes the name and contents of every file. If an application tries to overwrite one of these files after the snapshot is made, the operating system writes the new file contents to an unused location of the hard drive and preserves the original contents.
/source /somewhereElse/backup.0/
Rsync incremental does the same thing, with no special software or hardware.
Basically, it does
cp -al
This makes a ghost tree that is just hard links to the real tree. When a file is rsynced, rsync actually deletes and replaces the old file instead of changing the original file. This means you can use these hard links to track file revisions, and the idea is very similar to "copy-on-write".
The only drawback is that it isn't atomic, but most backup applications aren't that sensitive to a non-atomic backup operation anyway.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I work for a business that duplicates CDs and DVDs. We have a bunch of autloading/burning/printing machines from companies like Primera. We can burn around 1500-2000 CDs daily. Mostly for places like banks or H&R Block. Anyways, www.primera.com has autoloaders and such available for purchase. Those machines work pretty well, although they take up quite a bit of the windows resources at work. I think they have mac compatible machines, but haven't checked in a while.
IMHO, it beats the pants off re-burning a huge stack of CD's every year, while praying that none of them turned out to have a lifetime of 364 days.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
if it's data you need to archive but won't be accessing often, what about a simple solution such as an air-tight opaque box. without light or humidity, i would guess the discs would last much longer. after a certin point (x years), just bring up some handy disc copying software and copy for garunteed freshness!
People who regularly use insect sprays have the worst problems. The dried chemicals land on the fibers in the carpeting, and as they or their pets walk on the carpet their feet flick the toxic dust right back up into the air and into their lungs. Indoor air is now frequently more polluted than outdoor air.
Of course, you had a special case. You had a really, really stupid flea-infested roommate, and you used a flea-bomb one time to solve the problem. If it happens again, a good vacuuming immediately after the bombing and tossing out the bag when done would go a long way towards keeping your house healthy.
John
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.
If the size of your cd archive is large enough, there will be a point that >=1 cd will fail everyday. Archive renewal will then be a continous process of checking/copying/discarding cds. It's better off to stay with more stable media than continously spending time/money on this IMO.
Because of the high prices of duplicators, and the fact that I would have liked to be able to just feed the machine a bunch of blank disks and a couple of spindles of used disks, with different instructions for each disk to be copied, I came up with an interesting plan. I'd post a link if I could handle the slashdot effect, but you might be able to find something similar.
Basically, the idea was to use a 4'x8' table, a mini-ITX case with a bunch of external drives (some readers, some burners, depending on your needs) and an Automation Direct PLC with serial communication capability to set up a "pick and place" type system that could easily be scripted. I lost my motivation before I had the $2k it probably would have taken me to do it, but the plan was pretty solid.
I think the motivation behind it was an interesting ice cream vending machine I saw, which was more or less a box containing a consumer freezer, an arm to open the freezer, and a vacuum hose that would go to the proper coordinates, drop down, suck up the treat, and drop it into a chute.
Just think of the possibilities though. Thousands of blanks, matched with thousands of sources. It'd make a nifty interface for archival and automated backups, etc.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
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.
That's not what hard links are... hard links are indistinguishable from the original file. If you make a hard link, modify the hard link then you'll see the changes in the "original" as well.
A copy on write snapshot does not change when you change the live version of the filesystem.
- 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.
Every 6 months or so, I make a complete backup onto DVD-Rs. These days with 8x DVD-R burners and blank media going for $0.50, its just easier making backup copies onto DVD-Rs. Inbetween the 6 months, I backup if I have over 4.35gig of new stuff to backup and burn that.
That way you have a 'rotating' backup copy of your current items, as well as all your old backup copies.
RAID is a decent way to keep a systems FS up and running, but its no backup. I've had ATA cards and controlers take out whole HDD arrays.
Always backup, regardless...
Maybe I'm weird, but I find the HD a great backup medium. I don't have terabytes of shite I want to keep, but I do have about 80GB worth (slowly growing of course). This 80GB is made up of mostly iso images, movies, mp3s (mostly ripped, newer ones purchased from allofmp3.com), etc. It currently sits on a 120GB HD. When I bought this drive, I bought two. One for the stuff and one for the backup. Once every two weeks, a short cron job mounts the backup drive's partitions in /tmp, and throws rsync at the live stuff.
Now, this helps a lot with the "Jeesh I'm a dumbass" rm -rf scenario. If I don't remember within two weeks (or two days or whatever is left on the cycle) that I did a rm -rf on something I shouldn't have, well... Of course, if I did the rm -rf a few seconds before the cron job kicks off... OK... screwed.
When my 120GB drive gets close to full, I'll purchase two 200GB or two 280GB (or whatever) HDs and continue on. This has worked very well for me.
Oh yeah... If you set the backup drive to spin down, you'll feel good. hdparm is cool.
I am weird I guess.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
The obvious answer to every /. reader: Legos
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.
...to create a "WORM"-driver for a HDD. Like, it'd never delete anything by any normal file commands, store diffs for file changes, in general act almost like a WORM drive. Of course, if you're doing this "live" you'll have issues with files changing all the time. So simply configure it like:
For the last hour, keep all records.
For the last 24 hours, keep an hourly snapshot.
For the last week, keep a daily snapshot at midnight.
For the last 3 months, keep a weekly snapshot each Monday.
Basicly, it would work recursively to create the snapshot. If you're making a 1hr snapshot, combine all records of the last hour (i.e. if word auto-saved it 10 times, you get one "master diff". Same with 24h snapshot. Combine all the hourly ones. Changed it 8 times during the hours of a workday? It's now one daily diff.
Then you can simply have some "magic" functions like roll-back, cp -time "-4 hours" "mylostfile" "myrecoveredfile" etc. Given 100gb+ harddisks and 100kb word documents, umm I mean OpenOffice documents, why not?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I photograph graveyards using a Nikon D100 camera body, which on the medium quality setting produces 1.5-2MB JPG's. On a good day I'll shoot six to seven hundred images - 2 CD's worth. As I want these photos to survive my own death and someday be on file in the local historical society, I'm very concerned about their longevity.
Each night after I return from a photo expedition, I'll immediately copy the contents of the compact flash cards onto my Windows machine. They are stored there with a minimum of organization - just a directory named for the date. I then FTP them to the Linux machine, leaving a copy behind (plenty of disk space on the Windows machine).
On the Linux machine, on a 160GB disk that's used for almost nothing else, I'll sort the day's photos by location, putting them in subdirectories and adding a prefix to each filename based on the location (but leaving the image's original sequence number intact); this ensures that every file has a unique name even if the directories are munged together - something like "calvary/calvary7932.jpg"). I'll then group these directories together into lots of slightly under 650MB - depending on productivity, one day's work will fill either one or two CD's - write a text file as an index for each, and burn them.
My shell script wrapper for cdrecord will mount and list the contents of the disk after the burn is complete, allowing me to visually verify that it was successful. This has been useful, as on at least two occasions cdrecord recorded success but the disk would not mount.
At least five copies will be made of each, on different manufacturer's media, and stored in different locations. Currently, the media I'm using are Sony, Memorex, K-Hypermedia, Maxell Black, and Maxell Pro. These last are much more expensive but promise superior quality - time will tell if this is true.
The disks are stored in several locations - one copy of each into a sleeve in a binder, other copies storied upright in slim cases in various lightproof CD drawers in different rooms; a complete set is also at my parents' house in another city, and a friend in a nearby town will also be hosting a copy as soon as I drive out there with it.
I have a strict rule - no matter how tired I am, the Flash cards do not get erased until after I have written and verified at least one CD.
The images also remain on the 160GB drive in their original forms, and also in a parallel directory structure where everything has been resized (via shell scripts invoking gimp) to 600x400.
By next year I'll likely acquire a DVD-writer and make additional copies on DVD, again with the quintuple redundancy on different manufacturer's media. Five dollars isn't too much to spend to ensure the survival of a full day's work!
And a few years later, the process will be repeated with whatever replaces DVD's...
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).
I don't buy this optical storage crap. They said my Commodore 64 5.25" floppies had a maximum life of ten years and that after that the data would be too corrupt to read. I just pulled out my C64 again a couple of years ago. Today, I put in my old Telengard disk from 1983 (haven't used it since about 1986-7) and damn if that bitch still loads! Granted, for my inner paranoid dillusional side, I do make duplicates, but the short lifespan we're hearing about with optical media sounds bogus to me. The only problem I have had with CD-Rs in the past ten years is the flaking off of the non-write side off the CD. That makes those suckers un-readable. To avoid that, just don't buy el-cheapo CD-Rs or if you do, put a label on the non-write side to help keep the surface from flaking off. OR, buy a decent name brand and you wont have to worry about it.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn