Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
No, only pressed DVDs last and not all of them.
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This is what we should plan on.
However, my personal anecdotal experience is that I have never had one single DVD go bad on me. Not commercially purchased software, not commercially purchased videos, and not any DVD that I have burned myself to any kind of blank media - from ultra cheap to high end.
That being said, it's just my personal anecdote. The things that I have backed up that are really important to me are on three different hard drives in three different computers (two on-site, one off site). Also on a portable hard drive that is not powered of connected to a computer except during the short time a backup is actually in progress. I still have many things backed up to DVD and stored in a bank safe deposit box. But I have stopped maintaining that these days - but the old DVDs are still there. A few things I have encrypted and then emailed to myself at a destination address that is IMAP (messages stored on the providers server, not on my local computer).
Now all this having been said, only one time have I ever had to do a bare metal restore due to a hard disk that went belly up. That restore was an image restore, done from one of my local backups. And it went without a hitch ... perfect restore. I have done miscellaneous file restores from my backups over the years. That has always been to fix a user error - like accidentally (or on purpose, without adequate thought) deleting a file that I later wanted back.
Backups are your friend. Multiple ones. On different storage media. Stored at different locations. With at least one of those isolated from power and computer connections (totally unplugged) to protect against power surges, lightning strikes, etc.