# Are DVD-RW discs more reliable than HDD's ?



## Fif23 (Mar 13, 2009)

Say you had 80gb if ULTRA important data that you could not afford to lose, would you put it on an external hard drive or burn it on a DVD-RW media ? 

I mean, HDD's brick themselves all the time, and I have yet to see a good condition, scratch free CD fail to be read, even after 5-6 years of storage.

What do you think is the ultimate poor mans backup method ?


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## Pete1burn (Mar 13, 2009)

Copy it to two 120gb drives.  So you have it in the original location, plus two backups.  Triple redundancy.

If you're ultra paranoid, burn DVDs too.


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## Mussels (Mar 19, 2009)

Both. duplicated it to a hard drive and store the hard drive away, AND burn the data to discs and store them at a seperate location.

If they were ultra important to me, i'd be making more than one backup, thats for sure.


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## alexp999 (Mar 19, 2009)

Mussels said:


> Both. duplicated it to a hard drive and store the hard drive away, AND burn the data to discs and store them at a seperate location.
> 
> If they were ultra important to me, i'd be making more than one backup, thats for sure.



Exactly what I was going to say.

My Uni work for example is on:

Home PC
USB stick
Uni PC's

And if it was extremely important I would prob stick it on every USB device I had, every HDD I had, uni and a disc, lol.

At least with a DVD/CD it wont get wiped out in the event of an EMP


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## WhiteLotus (Mar 19, 2009)

as many places as you can find. I uploaded my sisters Travelling pictures to my computer, DVD disc, dads computer, and then to picasa/photobuket. Them photos aren't ever going to get erased.


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## FordGT90Concept (Mar 19, 2009)

HDD is more reliable than a DVD+/-R and DVD+/-R is more reliable than DVD+/-RW.

The ultimate protection is a tapes sent to a secure facility (e.g. Iron Mountain) for long-term storage.  Tapes, under the right temperature/humidity conditions can survive indefinitely.


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