A couple of weeks ago (back when I should have been writing this post), the Ur-Guru and I had a conversation about archival storage. He wondered what was going to replace DVDs, particularly for photos, because he was running out of room for them. He has hundreds now, since he has never thrown any away; some contain data copied from floppy disks or magnetic tape, back in the olden days.

Optical media (that’s the generic term that refers to both CDs and DVDs, because you use light to encode data onto them and to read what’s been written there) have been the consumer archive of choice ever since they became affordable. Once a year I copy that year’s client data and financial data onto CDs or DVDs and store them with my paper files. They’re flat, don’t require power, and seem to have a decent shelf-life, at least if you use the brand-name discs and keep them sealed in jewel cases where they’re protected from dust and scratches.

That’s all well and good for a year’s worth of my Word docs, WordPress databases, and mind maps, but it’s actually personal data that are outstripping optical media. Last time the Ur-Guru came to visit, he took home 80 GB of photos with him. That’s a lot of DVDs. It takes time to burn those, and space to store them.

I suggested Blu-Ray, but while the discs have a capacity of up to 50 GB (dual-layer), write speed is a max of 8x, and 2x or 4x is more common. The Blu-Ray burner will only set you back about $200, but the discs themselves are expensive: they can set you back $10 apiece. Still, as the technology becomes more widespread—if it has time to—Blu-Ray will probably replace today’s standard DVDs and at least temporarily shrink the size of our disc libraries. (Assuming we take the time to transfer our data from our old discs to the new ones, that is.)

Yet it seemed to me that with the sheer volume of photos that the Ur-Guru takes—especially since he works in RAW (or, if you’re a Nikon user, NEF)—the only feasible way to store his photos was on external hard drives.

But hard drives fail, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

They are, of course, much less likely to fail if they are not plugged in and spinning. The reason a magnetic drive is such a fragile creature is that it has moving parts, and they move very fast, and they move constantly. But a hard drive sitting on a shelf isn’t at the same kind of risk.

Even so, it seemed prudent to use two hard drives. If a DVD is accidentally destroyed, you aren’t losing very much data. But if you have a  500 GB or 1 TB hard drive and it gets destroyed—ouch!

So we went through a calculation of the costs. In the initial back-of-the-napkin calculations, the Ur-Guru estimated that it would be less expensive to use DVDs to store 1000 GB of photos. Then he realized that he had based all his calculations on the assumption that he would use 2.5” portable drives, which cost more than 3.5” drives. (Those are portable enough if you’re talking about putting them in your car, just awkward if you’re thinking of carrying them on an airplane. These are the figures he worked out the second time around:

• 1000GB / 4.5GB (size of DVD) = 222.2 DVDs of storage.
• 222.2 DVDs at 25 per spindle = 8.88 spindles
• A quality brand spindle of 25 is around 24 Euros.
• Cost of 2 XHDs (e.g. Samsung Story Station) @ 1TB = 170 Euros.
• Cost of 8.88 spindles of 25 DVD’s = 213 Euros.
• Savings: 43 Euros.

Additional Advantages

• Faster speed of backing up to XHD than to DVD (with verify on).
• Ability to replace files on XHD that you don’t have with DVD.
• Spread of risk because there are 2 identical XHD backups.
• 2 XHDs are lighter in weight and take up less space than 222 DVDs.

Two hundred DVDs stacked on a spindle don’t look like that much. In jewel cases (which you would have to buy separately) or even sleeves (ditto), they get bulkier fast. RAW photos at 10 or 12 or more megapixels, HD video at 1080p—DVDs just can’t cut it anymore. Blu-Ray may come to take its place, but meanwhile, hard drives are cheap. Some of them are actually designed to stack on top of each other. And you can re-use them.

CDs and DVDs are a pretty clumsy way to make backups now that external drives and online backup services are so readily available. They only hold so much data, they’re subject to scratching, and they tend to pile up. If you keep them in jewel cases the way you’re supposed to, they can take up a quite a lot of room, too. What with all these new netbooks and lightweight laptops being made without optical drives, you might start to wonder whether you actually need to have one at all.

But CDs and DVDs definitely have a place, and this is a good time of year to remember it. (Yes, this is your annual “Back Up Your Taxes” post in disguise.) When you want to send data through the mail or file it with your papers, putting it onto optical media is the simplest and least expensive way to do it. Even brand-name CDs (which last longer than no-name CDs), inkjet-printable CDs (for those who have fancy printers who can handle them), and LightScribe CDs and DVDs generally cost less than $1 apiece. (I do recommend getting the LightScribe CDs or printable CDs if you have the appropriate devices for labeling them, because it’s safer than applying external labels or writing directly on the CD.)

So now that you’ve finished your taxes, copy the PDF of your tax return (if you used tax prep software) onto a CD, along with the end-of-year copy of your financial records from 2008, and store that with the paper printout of the return and all the supporting documentation you need. Remember to use a non-rewritable CD. (They last better over time, and the point of archives is not to overwrite them, as well as to be able to demonstrate that you put the information there on a certain date.)

I also put my client records from the past year onto DVD (one per business entity) while I’m at it, and move any no-longer-current client records down to the archives. Sometimes, if I’m very efficient, I do this before tax time rolls around, but this year I didn’t.

The main reason for the delay was that my optical drive died a painful death in January. It had a seizure right in the middle of burning a CD for an about-to-be-ex client. (I was trying to copy all the files she’d used me to back up over the years, so I could send them to her and she could back them up herself.) The drive just wouldn’t stop spinning, even when I pushed the emergency eject button with an unbent paperclip. I finally had to reboot the machine, and thereafter could only occasionally read CDs and DVDs, and not write them at all. (I ended up putting the client’s files onto a memory stick and mailing that. More expensive, and more trouble, since I had to go out and buy the thing first.)

I contacted HP support (help via text chat is free; help via phone costs money). They gave me some suggestions, none of which helped. It was, as I thought, a hardware problem. The drive was shot.

So what’s the big deal about not having a working CD/DVD drive? After all, computers worked just fine for years before optical drives became standard. But in those days, we had floppy drives, and I defy you to find a laptop built in the last 5 years that has a floppy disk drive, or an operating system you can install from one.

And that, really, is the burning issue. Um, so to speak. I have an external CD/DVD writer, bought during the days when I had a laptop that could read CDs but not write them. It works fine with Enna, so even though my housemate has had custody of it for the past few years, I can go hook my machine up to the FireWire cable and burn data onto optical discs that way. It’s clumsy, but it works in a pinch.

But an external drive is a chancy option when it comes to booting the machine from a CD, which is what you have to do in order to reinstall the operating system. And Enna desperately needs to be reinstalled from the ground up. Too much clutter has accumulated, and it affects the machine’s performance.

So what are the options?

If you’re extremely skilled, you can create a USB stick that mimics a boot CD (notably the famous Bart-PE CD that I use to run Norton Ghost, but other kinds of boot CDs as well.) I am not that skilled, though the Ur-Guru has promised to create a USB version of the rescue DVD that came with my netbook when he visits.

You can go into the BIOS and try to convince your machine to boot from an external device before it looks for the CD, floppy, or hard drive, then use an external CD drive. Laptops that don’t have built-in optical drives are already configured to do this; I remember reinstalling one from its external CD drive, and it worked just fine. When I got the netbook, the salesperson at Best Buy tried to sell me an external DVD drive, but I passed, because I already own one. Only later did I discover that the netbook won’t recognize it. (I’m not sure why. Perhaps there’s something wrong with its USB connector, and the netbook doesn’t have FireWire.)

But even if that works, it’s something else to carry. The reason the Ur-Guru plans to make me a special recovery USB stick is because it will take up a lot less room in a travel case than even a slimline USB DVD drive. The point of getting the netbook was that it hardly weighs anything; adding an external optical drive would nearly double its weight. As for my main laptop. it’s so big that I’d be hard put to find a case I could fit an extra drive into, especially since I already travel with a backup hard drive. (The smallest of the external optical drives aren’t any thicker than my FreeAgent Go drive or my MiniVault, but they are wider.)

So my only real option was to order a replacement for the broken drive. In a desktop PC, this would be a trivial thing. You could get one from almost anywhere, and even buying one from HP, it would only cost $50. But to get a new internal CD/DVD drive for my HP Pavilion DV8040us laptop cost $225.96 plus tax and shipping, which even the HP support guys thought constituted highway robbery. Laptop parts are scandalously overpriced, and you almost always have to get them directly from the manufacturer.

The new drive arrived promptly, but with no installation instructions whatsoever. This resulted in a rather comical, if painful, interlude involving Sallie and a number of tiny screwdrivers, attempting to dismantle far more of my machine than proved necessary. As it happened, only one screw has to be undone in order to slide out the optical drive, but I had to take out 8 other screws before I discovered that, and some of them were stuck, and most of them were in narrow holes that my better-quality, better-leverage screwdriver couldn’t reach. “Oh, look! There are the hard drives! Better put that panel back.” I did eventually find a parts manual and download it. Should have done that to begin with.

Anyway, once I discovered the trick to popping out the old drive and snapping in the new one, I thought I’d be set. But no—the machine got hung up on the “HP Invent” screen and wouldn’t boot. (Did I back up before I started messing with the hardware? You bet.) In fact, I couldn’t even get into the BIOS or the help screen. I shut down, took the new drive out, put the old drive back in. The machine booted normally. A little further discussion with HP resulted in confirmation that my very expensive new drive was defective. Ta ever so.

So they sent me a replacement for a replacement, and this time it worked. I had to reinstall the LightScribe drivers for some reason, but once again I have a functioning optical drive, so I was able to make my tax-time archive CD and DVDs. HP paid for me to return the defective drive to them so they could recycle it, which took care of one piece of electronic waste.

But now I have no more excuses to postpone reinstalling my computer.

I don’t write a lot about CDs and DVDs these days. For most things, they’re kind of a nuisance as a backup medium. They’ve never had the drag-and-drop simplicity of floppy diskettes, and not all discs are compatible with all drives, either. My laptop can burn dual-layer DVDs, but I’ve never used one, and the whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle leaves me cold. I can’t really blame Apple for leaving out the optical drive when they built the MacBook Air.

Nevertheless, optical discs are a good ways from obsolete. (Why “optical”? Because the data gets burned onto a disc using a laser. Hard drives, and tape on the other hand, use magnets to record data.) So when PC Magazine announced that they were giving away the full version of Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 (the newest-but-one version of the software) to registered users of their site, I decided to check it out.

At first it seemed that none of the logins I already had for PC Magazine and Ziff-Davis sites worked, but apparently the site just wanted me to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. In any case, it’s easy enough to register as a user, and it’s free. I registered initially because I sometimes download white papers about backup technology (and then have to explain to hapless salespeople that I only wanted them for my column).

I didn’t really need Ashampoo, as I already have Nero Burning ROM. (And I blush to admit how long it took me to get that pun in spite of the logo with the Colosseum in flames—an anachronism, by the way, as the Colosseum wasn’t built until after Nero died.) I haven’t done a detailed comparison of the two programs, though one would expect Nero to have a few extra features to go with its much heftier price tag.

I don’t use nearly all of Nero’s features, and unless you’re a dedicated disc creator, you probably wouldn’t, either. In any case, while Nero has a backup utility, it doesn’t jump out at you when you start the program. I’m not sure I even installed it when I put Nero back on my computer after the latest reinstall.

Ashampoo, on the other hand, touts the following among the hot new features of Burning Studio 6:

• Multi-disc file backup and restore on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs
• Create compressed backup archives with powerful password protection
• Restore archive contents to their original locations

(Curiously, the hot features for Burning Studio 7 are all to do with video DVDs and bootable discs; they don’t appear to have upgraded the backup capabilities significantly from version 6.)

“Backup or Restore Files and Folders” is the second option on the main splash screen, and it’s certainly easy to do. I selected the whole Podcast Asylum folder (4.5 GB, just the right size for a DVD) and clicked “continue,” and the backup proceeded along its merry way.

Not speedily, I might say. Burning the data to the DVD wasn’t that time-consuming; it must have been the conversion to the proprietary .ashbak format and the data verification. The result is four .ashbak files of just about 1 GB each, and I imagine that if I’d been backing up a larger quantity of data, I’d have had several DVDs full of these 1 GB .ashbak files, rather the way my Ghost backups are made up of numerous 2 GB .ghs files.

The good and bad news about proprietary formats like this is that you have to have the Ashampoo Burning Studio software in order to restore the files. That can actually be a help, if you don’t want everyone and his brother to be able to get at your data. (Ashampoo lets you password-protect the files as well as compressing them, too.) Restoring is straightforward: you can choose the backup that’s on the disc in your drive or a backup from another location (Ashampoo will back up to other media than CDs and DVDs). Beyond that, your options are to restore data to the original location or to a custom location, and to overwrite files already in that location, or not.

The verdict: it works, you can get it free while the offer lasts, and if you prefer optical discs for backup, it’s probably a good choice. It doesn’t make complete drive images, and you can’t automate or schedule it, two limitations which mean it would be a bad idea to rely solely on Burning Studio 6 for your backups. But for those end-of-year archives, it’s got possibilities.

Of course, you can use Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 to make ordinary copies of files onto CDs and DVDs. To do that, you use the “Burn Files and Folders” option instead of the Backup utility. And you can do all the other usual things one gets a program like this for: copy discs, make audio CDs, burn disc images, and make video DVDs. Judging by the ratings it gets at Download.com, it does these things pretty well. I’ll have to try it the next time I need to make a CD for my mother.

This is the post I was planning to write last week, your annual reminder that you need to archive your data at the end of each year. (If your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, you should create these archives then.)

I’ve written about year-end backups on several occasions before. Because (as I pointed out in December 2005) these aren’t really backups, I’m going to stop talking about “year-end backups” and start talking about “annual archives.” At the end of 2004, and again in December 2006, I described the kinds of data that goes into one of these archives. My focus up to this point has been on archiving your data for tax purposes, so those posts address primarily financial and business data.

The need to back up–and archive–all supporting documents relating to your business income and expenses has not gone away. I’ve just made 4 DVDs to add to the tax box. There’s one for each of my business personas (the FileSlinger, the Author-izer, and the Podcast Asylum) and one with the new promo photos the Ur-Guru took this year. (You can see some of them on Flickr.) The most time-consuming thing about making them was isolating 2007 data. In some cases I had already done this, but I haven’t been completely consistent.

Once it was done, I removed all finished projects from 2007 from my C drive to make room for 2008 projects. I’m not that pressed for storage space on my machine, but it’s annoying to have to look through folders for clients I’m finished with, or previous versions of documents I’m working on, when I want to get to my current work. So I use making the annual archive as an opportunity to tidy up my hard drive.

That’s all business as usual. But more and more people are using computers to do more and more things. You might well want to make an annual archive even if you don’t have to worry about tax audits. Here are a few examples of data that it pays to be able to save each year even if you’re a student, a stay-at-home parent, or retired.

Coursework and Student Records

You might want to go back and use that essay or project for something else one day, and chances are you’re going to remember it by what class you had to do it for. You might need your grades and transcripts in order to pursue an advanced degree or get a job. And you might need to provide someone with evidence that you really did take such-and-such a class. But you’re probably not going to need it all on your main hard drive, and you may not even need it on your main backup drive. Burn it to a CD or DVD, label it with the year, and archive it. (Preferably off site.)

Some class projects take up more space than others. If you’re studying video, you’ll probably need more than one DVD per year. You might consider using an external drive to store your annual archives. Toshiba has just announced 1.8-inch hard drives with capacities up to 120 GB. I wonder how long it will take before someone comes out with a tray, rack, or box designed to store them safely.

And Speaking of Photos and Video…

Film cameras have all but disappeared. Digital cameras mean we take more pictures, because we don’t have to worry about running out of film, and if they don’t come out, you can always delete them. How are your photos organized? In some cases, it might make sense to sort them by subject, but if you archive each year’s photos into a folder with the date, you’ll have a much easier time when it comes to showing your grandchildren what you looked like in high school, or embarrassing your child by showing his baby pictures to his first girlfriend.

Also, if you take a lot of photos, your hard drive starts to fill up. Keep the best ones on your hard drive and store the rest on DVDs or an external drive. Then you won’t have to look through 1000 photos to find the two you actually wanted to print.

If you use a photo-sharing service like Flickr or Photobucket, those can act as backups of the pictures you upload, as well as helping you organize them and letting you show them to other people. There are even programs to back up your Flickr photos.

E-mail and Contacts

Even if all your correspondence is personal, you might want to save it–and to save the e-mail or postal addresses of the friends and family members you write to. If you make a copy for each year, it will save you a lot of time and trouble when you decide to write your memoir or family history. Your calendar information can be useful there, too. Even if you never write a memoir, your children or grandchildren might want to know what your life was like back when. If you’re like me, you forget a lot of the details.

Your Blog

Most of the blogs I read are business blogs, but many people do use blogs to write personal journals. If you think you’re going to want to read what you wrote on LiveJournal or MySpace or Blogger, better make a copy of what you’ve posted. It’s good to back these things up regularly, but even if that’s too much trouble, save your blog onto a CD or DVD at least once a year. (Most blogs don’t take up a lot of storage space.) If you want more details about backing up your blog, see my previous posts on the subject or do a Google search for “backup <name of blogging platform>.” There are even tools like Blurb BookSmart to let you back up your blog in hardcopy format by turning it into a book, though they don’t work with all blogs.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Remember to store your annual archives somewhere other than the place you keep your working files: in another room, at a friend’s house, in your safe deposit box.

Financial Data

Receipts

Invoices

Bills

Business Data

E-mail

Software

Privacy