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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.
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?
"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.
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.
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