Backup Awareness Month is over, but that doesn’t mean you should stop thinking about backups. (Did anyone win a drive from Maxtor? Inquiring minds want to know.)

In an attempt to cut down on music and movie piracy, Spain has decided to impose a new tax on blank media: CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, even cell phones. In creating this law, the Spanish government somehow overlooked hard drives as a possible storage device for illegal copies of software and media, and elected not to impose it on the ADSL lines commonly used for downloading such material. (Here in the US, we wouldn’t need to tax DSL lines: the slow speed of our so-called high-speed connections makes downloading ripped DVDs too much trouble.)

The problem, as the outraged people of Spain have quick to point out, is that there are more uses for blank media than violating copyright laws. (There are more problems than that: the law apparently lacks any mechanism by which the money collected through this tax will be returned to copyright holders.)

The amount of the tax has yet to be set (or at any rate, to be revealed to the public), but it probably won’t be so large as to deter people from buying blank media. And if it does, the hard drive manufacturers will be sitting pretty.

It’s quite possible that such a tax will come to the US. Spain isn’t the first European country to attempt to curb copyright violations in this manner, and the film and recording industries appear to have decided that since they can’t prevent piracy, they might as well try to get a piece of the action.

So go make your backups while media is cheap!

Links:
Pierce IP Law Blog
The Register
Slashdot

Another year is drawing to a close, which means it’s time for your year-end backups. (For more detail on end-of-year backups, see my December 2004 backup reminder.)

Strictly speaking, year-end backups aren’t really backups; they’re archives. You make copies of all your important computer files from the year in question to store with your paper files. You need to keep anything relevant to your taxes (like your Quicken or QuickBooks data, bank statements, invoices from vendors, invoices to clients, and so on) for seven years.

That means that if, six and a half years from now, the IRS wants to see those files, they’d better be able to read the CD or DVD you put them on. (Or, yes, tape, if you’re really that kind of masochist. We do know that tapes, if not in use, can last 30 years and still be readable.)

Inexpensive generic CDs work fine for short-term backups or anything else which you consider disposable, but if you want the disc to be readable even one year from now, make sure you use high-quality brand-name CDs and DVDs. Otherwise they may start to rot, and when you take them out of their jewel cases, you’ll be able to see through them.

And yes, jewel cases do provide the best protection against scratches and dust, though you can get away with plastic or paper sleeves if 1) you can seal them and 2) you’re not putting the disc in, say, an overstuffed archive box where the surrounding papers will exert the pressure of 20,000 leagues under the sea.

And, finally, don’t use rewritable CDs or DVDs for archival purposes. First, you don’t want to write over this data, so there’s no point. Second, you’ll be wasting your money: rewritable discs are always more expensive than write-once discs. Third, if the disc has been written to numerous times before, it will be more vulnerable to data loss in the writing phase and won’t last as long in storage.

And finally, CD-RWs are not compatible with all CD drives, particularly those on older machines. Though it’s unlikely that you’ll be trying to read your year-end backups seven years from now on a Windows 98 machine, it’s possible that you’ll need to get into your archives one year from now on an older machine that you’re using while your new, top-of-the-line computer is in the shop for repairs. As “Dr. Gizmo” advised in Wednesday’s Syracuse Post-Standard:

The ‘RW’ method was added to the ways CDs work long after the technology of recording CDs was invented, and could not have been more troublesome if the inventors of the CD had decided to use hot peanut butter as the method of making rewriteable CDs.

The pits etched by the recorder’s laser on a CD-RW are much smaller than the CD standard calls for. Most old CD drives and many current home and car CD players can’t figure out what’s on a CD-RW.

Don’t take chances with your important business and financial records. Copy them onto good quality media, put them into jewel cases, and store them in a safe place away from your office.

Then you can ring in the New Year with confidence.