Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.) Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old! Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable."

David Pogue discovered the dirty little secret about optical media... it deteriorates over time. Even commercially pressed media may fail. I recently bought an out-of-print CD from eBay that plays primarily static. Fortunately, it was only a $1. I used to backup all my tax returns and supporting data to a CD-R. I pulled one out when I read this story and guess what? It's a good thing I have my 2002 return backed up elsewhere because I'm not getting it off the CD.

A couple of years ago I made an impassioned plea to all the readers of our sites to implement a solid backup solution, preferably an off-site one. I figured it was time for an update on my solutions, and a refresher for everyone on the importance of backing up their data.

I was a Carbonite user for a couple of years, but last year I discovered something quite ugly: Carbonite filtered out EXE files, ISO files, and a few other file types. I have a few small ISO files I keep in my documents folder; these are boot CDs I might need to duplicate in the future. And as for EXE files, I purchase digital software quite often, and these EXE files are required if I need to re-install the software. I consider both ISO and EXE files to be part of my data - things that, if I lost, I'd be very upset because they'd be difficult to get back or re-create. Read more...

"Film studios that have switched to Blu-ray may have crowed a little too early because the much-praised BD+ copy protection is an ad absurdum affair now, too. With today's release of version 6.4.0.0 of AnyDVD HD it is now also possible to make backup security copies of Blu-ray discs protected with BD+. Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group will have to revise his statement from July, 2007 regarding BD+: "BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years". It is worth mentioning that since he made that statement only eight months have gone by."

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