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Data Storage Hardware

What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator? 195

Posted by Cliff from the life-extension-by-cloning dept.
zachjb asks: "With all of the recent articles and buzz in the technology community regarding recordable/pressed optical disks being an unreliable medium to backup your data on, I figured the best way to keep my data alive is to duplicate my CDs/DVDs every few years. I've searched Froogle for CD/DVD duplicators, but I have no idea what I should be looking for. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a lot experience with this type of equipment? Is this a reasonable solution to the problem or is there a more cost effective one?"
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What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator? More

What Makes a Good CD/DVD Duplicator?

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  • Just toss another drive into your PC... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:45PM (#9091177)
    For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.

    There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 [bwayphoto.com] you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box [emachines.com] if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.

    If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.

    • Re:Just toss another drive into your PC... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ahfoo ( 223186 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @03:03AM (#9092030) Journal
      I agree and that wouldn't mean much, were it not for the fact that I work with a publisher that produces book/CD sets and we turn out tens of thousands of CDs a year and we do them all by hand on standard CD burners using standard CD-R blanks. It's nowhere near as hard as it sounds. A thousand a week can be done with very little effort and since we have secretaries sitting around doing nothing most of the time, the labor is essentially free and they don't mind because it gives them an excuse to surf the net while they're changing disks. At one point we outsourced the copying, but it was apparent the company we outsourced to was just using CDRs, so we decided to do it ourselves for far, far less money. Outsourcing probably starts to make sense around ten thousand copies and at that point, you are probably doing quite well and not so worried about costs. But doing one at a time is indeed quite fast once you get started on several machines simultaneously.
      Of course the downside to all this is that since we started adding CDs to our books, our sales have actually declined and the same is true for our competitors. It's easy to guess why, if it's so cheap and easy for us to make copies . . .
    • --I found a really nice CD duplicator at Target (brand name is E3WORKS) for about $200. Comes complete with USB 2.0 connection and audio-out.

      Here's the exact model [e3works.com]. It even works under Linux, as long as your kernel supports the right USB options.

  • Don't worry too much (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:47PM (#9091188) Journal
    It's pointless to invest a lot in it now, unless you already have a lot of disks that are getting over 5 or 6 years old.

    If you are just thinking about the future, you might as well just wait until the next big thing is out and the copy them when that time comes.

  • Sounds like a job for RAID... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:49PM (#9091194)
    Personally, I think the best long term storage for a Slashdot reader would to be to build a home RAID server. Hard drives fail, but they rarely fail all at once. That's why a designed-for-redundancy RAID is perfect for this situation.

    You don't really need to be concerned about hot-swapping, because you can afford your pictures being unavailable for the hour or so while you're swapping out a failed HD every few years.

    • Re:Sounds like a job for RAID... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:52PM (#9091211) Journal
      RAID != backup though.

      Malicious programs, accidental rm -rf... filesystem corruption.. bugs..

      Set up some rsync backups for your data to multiple separate systems, with at least one offsite.

      You can do rsync-incremental backups too if you want a really good backup solution. Rdiff -backup uses similar ideas too, but the simlipcity of rsync-incrementals can't be beat.
      • RAID protects against the hardware failure. User Error can still delete things. Thats why you use snapshots. Copy in all the data to the raidded failsystem. Then snapshot(lock all the inodes). If you do it correctly You can even keep the filesystem writeable and then every now and again when your sure everything is cool, take a second snapshot. Remove the older snapshots when space is needed. About the only thing that will kill this is kernel FS corruption or a drunk admin removing and delteing snapshots

        • Re:Snapshots ... more info (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:12PM (#9091286)
          Snapshot This!
          A snapshot is a freeze-frame image of your computer's hard drive. The location and contents of every file are noted in an instant, and then the computer continues with its work. Making a snapshot is like making an instant backup of the hard disk to the same drive.

          Not every operating system supports snapshots, but the feature is becoming more popular. It was recently introduced in FreeBSD 5.0, for instance, although it wasn't really reliable until the 5.2 version. Snapshots have been a part of NetApp's gFiler appliances and EMC's storage systems for years.

          The advantage of the snapshot is that it can be made very fast and it takes up hardly any disk space at all. That's because snapshots are implemented with a technique called "copy on write." Basically, the operating system makes a map that notes the name and contents of every file. If an application tries to overwrite one of these files after the snapshot is made, the operating system writes the new file contents to an unused location of the hard drive and preserves the original contents.

          The same thing is done with directories. If you try to delete a file inside a directory, the computer actually writes a second directory onto the disk that doesn't have the file you just deleted. If you want to get back a file after you've accidentally deleted it, you just retrieve it from the snapshot.

          On my primary server, for instance, I have a program that makes a snapshot every night at 11 p.m. I keep these snapshots for seven days, then they are automatically deleted.

          The disadvantage of snapshots is that deleting a file doesn't actually free up space on the disk-the blocks remain "used" until every snapshot that references the file is deleted too. And, of course, snapshots don't protect you against a hardware failure or somebody accidentally formatting the hard drive.

          One last thing: Once you have your backup system in place, you should practice trying to restore a backup from time-to-time. The best way to do this is to take a brand-new computer and a set of your backup tapes, and see if you can restore a 100 percent working system. Many organizations can't, so don't overlook this important test.
          • "copy on write." Basically, the operating system makes a map that notes the name and contents of every file. If an application tries to overwrite one of these files after the snapshot is made, the operating system writes the new file contents to an unused location of the hard drive and preserves the original contents.

            Rsync incremental does the same thing, with no special software or hardware.

            Basically, it does
            cp -al /source /somewhereElse/backup.0/

            This makes a ghost tree that is just hard links to the r

            • cp -al /source /somewhereElse/backup.0/

              This makes a ghost tree that is just hard links to the real tree. When a file is rsynced, rsync actually deletes and replaces the old file instead of changing the original file. This means you can use these hard links to track file revisions, and the idea is very similar to "copy-on-write".

              That's not what hard links are... hard links are indistinguishable from the original file. If you make a hard link, modify the hard link then you'll see the changes in the "orig

              • That's not what hard links are... hard links are indistinguishable from the original file. If you make a hard link, modify the hard link then you'll see the changes in the "original" as well.
                You're technicall correct of course - but the parent was also correct in intent. Rsync does indeed do an unlink() before it writes over an existing file, so the effect is what is desired.

      • How much would it take... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @05:10AM (#9092239) Homepage
        ...to create a "WORM"-driver for a HDD. Like, it'd never delete anything by any normal file commands, store diffs for file changes, in general act almost like a WORM drive. Of course, if you're doing this "live" you'll have issues with files changing all the time. So simply configure it like:

        For the last hour, keep all records.
        For the last 24 hours, keep an hourly snapshot.
        For the last week, keep a daily snapshot at midnight.
        For the last 3 months, keep a weekly snapshot each Monday.

        Basicly, it would work recursively to create the snapshot. If you're making a 1hr snapshot, combine all records of the last hour (i.e. if word auto-saved it 10 times, you get one "master diff". Same with 24h snapshot. Combine all the hourly ones. Changed it 8 times during the hours of a workday? It's now one daily diff.

        Then you can simply have some "magic" functions like roll-back, cp -time "-4 hours" "mylostfile" "myrecoveredfile" etc. Given 100gb+ harddisks and 100kb word documents, umm I mean OpenOffice documents, why not?

        Kjella
        • This resembles how the Plan 9 filesystem works. It keeps *every* version of every file, forever (unless you use the admin tools to erase the archives). It was originally intended to use WORM jukeboxes to offload old copies, but now it's pretty cheap to run it using just huge amounts of online storage.
    • What if a power spike blows up your system?
    • Except that:
      • Neither RAID nor hard drive backups provide the file versioning capability that tape or offline backups provide.
      • Doesn't help for the "rm -rf" situation.

      Even for all that, I mostly use the same online storage you describe. :)

      Sometimes, though, I like to archive that stuff off to cd or dvd. When I do, I use par2 [sf.net] to generate parity sets of the data I archive to dvd. That way, if I suffer some minimal bit rot, I can still correct it. With large enough parity sets, you can even correct f

  • I find a CD writer helps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coupland ( 160334 ) * <dchase@hotmailCHEETAH.com minus cat> on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:49PM (#9091195) Journal

    Seriously is the author daft? If you're only duplicating your disks every few years then I've got news for you -- a second 24x or faster CD-writer costs under a hundred bucks! And every CD burning program out there supports disk duplication.

    Seriously, even if it takes a couple days I don't understand why you need a machine dedicated to disk duplication if you re-burn your backups only every two or three years. Or perhaps are you looking for advice on disk pirating devices and you used a recent (and duplicate) /. article as an excuse to slip under the radar?

    • Or perhaps are you looking for advice on disk pirating devices and you used a recent (and duplicate) /. article as an excuse to slip under the radar?

      Those burn-seven-at-a-time CD burners smell like devices that would only be bought by software pirates. Why would anybody want to buy and then use one of those, when you could just send your master CD to a fulfillment operation that duplicates CDs for a living?

      When you need more than 2000 copies of the same CD, the price those places charge per disc starts t

      • Re:I find a CD writer helps (Score:4, Informative)

        by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:22PM (#9091320) Homepage Journal
        We use a 7x duplicator for our under 500 jobs. Anything more and we usually send it off. A glass master press is too expensive for small jobs like that.

        The thing has paid for itself a hundred times over - the markup on CDs is amazing, and with the demand for small runs we make a tidy side profit from our normal business. The duplicator sits on our multimedia developer's desk and he can run about 500 almost unconsciously.

        Man, I sound like a magazine testimonial.
      • At my PSU campus our department has one of those multiple burner rigs. We use it to make CDs each semester for all enrolled CS students (under 200) and we make available (when asked) for copies of linux distributions (downloaded isos burned). The standard CDs include LaTeX programs, pdfs of handouts for all classes, and tons of other freeware (or we licensed it for the entire department cheaply) programs that students find helpful, like the ADA compilier used in the class.

        This helps a lot for our student
      • Why would anybody want to buy and then use one of those, when you could just send your master CD to a fulfillment operation that duplicates CDs for a living?

        My church uses those things to make copies of the sermons to sell for $2.00. This fills a perfect need. If you need onsies or twosies, use a computer. If you need a thousand, use a commercial house. If you need a few dozen in an hour or so, a duplicator is perfect!

    • If you're only duplicating your disks every few years then I've got news for you -- a second 24x or faster CD-writer costs under a hundred bucks! And every CD burning program out there supports disk duplication.

      Definitely _way_ under $100. I picked up my 52x24x52 CD-RW for $0. And guess how much the 100-CD spindles cost? You guessed it. Free.

      It pays to look at local ads, those two deals come up pretty frequently at places like OfficeMax, CompUSA, and Staples.

      Personally, though, I'd go for a pseudo-RAID

    • Sheer Volume (Score:5, Insightful)

      by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:59PM (#9091239) Homepage Journal

      I personally have over 1000 audio CDs, 800 DVDs, and another 1500 or so archive CDs (patch downloads, dev kits, work backups, etc.)

      Having played CD monkey just reading a few of the audio CDs, I can't imagine trying to duplicate the whole set by hand.

      What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.

      I do know that you can expect to pay a few grand for such a setup. I know one fellow who set up a drive tower with 6 CD readers just to load his audio collection into MP3's for his player.

      While most people consider a couple hundred disks a "collection", there are plenty of us media junkies who've actually own thousands of legal media.

      • Re:Sheer Volume (Score:3, Insightful)

        by coupland ( 160334 ) *
        Sorry but to me you still sound like a pirate. Anyone who understands technology knows that the CD was the pinnacle of optical storage technology. When the CD came out it was *hundreds* of times bigger than a hard drive, but today a hard drive is *hundreds* of times larger than even a DVD. No one smart still backs up data to optical media -- RAID5 or a second PC is always cheaper and faster. If you have thousands of CD's that need to be backed up you should do it to another hard drive. Otherwise you're

        • Re:Sheer Volume (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Read Icculus ( 606527 )
          I have many thousands of CDs that I have burnt over the last ~8 years. Audios as well as backups in lossless data formats of all of those CDs. All legal as can be.

          I really have no worries about trying to duplicate all those thousands of discs.

          The prospect of backing up all of my data to a different medium is daunting at best. The option of having everything backed up to a RAID setup just has not been viable at all until recent times. Even now I'd need at least a couple TBs just to fit all of the lossless

        • Why in the world would I use an entire DVD or tape media to back up a project that compresses to a couple hundred megs of .tgz?

          One volume, one version. Cheap, handy, easy to dup when it's time to deliver to the customer.

          I'll really be fascinated to see how well your RAID5 does with a site disaster like a fire or a flood.

          I'm also curious how you use the RAID5 to deploy a hot backup server.

          The most baffling thing is how you manage to store your RAID5 in an offsite facility for emergencies while cont

          • I think you should look at the post he wanted to archive his CD collection RAID5 would work fine for that even striping for the simple reason it's not a backup as much as an archive, he isn't going to throw the CD's away. Now having said that for disaster recovery you should be looking at a combination of tape/disk and RAID generaly. You need a good long term backup with incrementals that can be easily provided by Tape and possibly optical media or cheap removable disk depending on the volume of data and

            • You just don't get it -- RAID volumes are a fact of life for datacenters. It's not an "extra", it's not an "add on".

              Hot swap RAID arrays allow the servers to keep running, even while they rebuild a failed drive. That is their purpose, and they serve it well.

              Archive media is a different requirement entirely, and you seriously need to get over the mentality that RAID is the be-all end-all solution to your problems.

              Lets say you offline the system and image those RAID arrays (bad idea in the first plac

              • I dont think you get it your talking about low end embedded raid controlers those are for the OS disks thats about it they are worthless in a datacenter, I'm talking datacenter here 50k plus square feet with millions in hardware it's what I know.

                I dont sugest using raid drives for backup thats where tape fits in. (Optical if your needs are tiny and if your running more than one machine that dosent fit)

                I'm talking about online real time block for block replication to a remote facility. If you have to use

                • The block repliction you mention is handled by EMC and equivalent storage solutions from other vendors.

                  You know as well as I do that how far you go for disaster recovery depends on budget. The cheapest is offsite archiving, which loses some data and takes the longest to restore.

                  Next up is hot backup systems -- identically configured, they just need to have an image restored from the archives. Whether optical or tape depends on the size of the archives and the budget, but it's not a disk pack!

                  Hot fa

          • Uhm, are you just stupid? I work in IT for a large company and I fully understand the difference between backup, data recovery, data retention, disaster recovery and business continuity. And you, my friend, are dumb as a post. Casual users don't need hot backups, offsite storage, or disaster recovery as you assert above. Were we talking about enterprise disaster recovery, or some schmuck who was backing up his hard drive to CD? Sorry Charlie, it was the latter. If you need lessons in the differences b
      • With a collection that size a raid system with several terrabyte hard drives may be the the better option. Duplicating a couple of hard drives is far easier than duplicating several thousand disks. Just make sure the drives mirror. Whenever you get a new disk rip it to the hard drive and duplicate your saved files to the hard drive array. You'll have a few weeks/months to catch up but at least once they are archived you can do searches for specific files. It's a lot easier to find a driver on a file marked

      • Re:Sheer Volume (Score:3, Informative)

        by Jardine ( 398197 )
        What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.

        You mean something like this [sentex.net]?
    • But are the duplicators reliable. Can I stick any CD(game)(audio)(data)/DVD(data)(game)(movie) in and expect it to copy?

      Or even give an error if it won't work?

      With minimal effort?

      How about a program to consolidate all my CD's onto DVDs? Such an obvious concept but once again left wanting :(

  • Online Storage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BeagleBoi ( 87688 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:49PM (#9091196) Homepage
    I don't trust offline storage - bitrot is real.

    I've decided that I'm going to keep all my data in online storage - the hard drives in my server. It's backed up (to an external USB2 hard drive) and I'm not going to lose it or find that I can't read it in five years.

    Drive storage is cheap, simple and it works.

    • Re:Online Storage (Score:2, Interesting)

      by entitude ( 770810 )
      I'm not going to lose it or find that I can't read it in five years.

      Unless you suffer a catastrophic hard drive failure.

    • Re:Online Storage (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      I agree with you to a point. I have most of my data mirrored on two computers. If one fails or gets hacked, I can just use the other machine. I do this because my data is not all that important. Life will not stop and a company will not fail if I lose a few days of even weeks of data.

      When I was dealing with real data, it was backed up on tape. One tape with a week end full backup. One tape per day with the changed data. I made an effort to store the previous cycle of tapes off site. Offline storag

    • I've decided that I'm going to keep all my data in online storage - the hard drives in my server. It's backed up (to an external USB2 hard drive) and I'm not going to lose it or find that I can't read it in five years.

      You need to be careful with strategies like this. If the drive you're backing up doesn't fail catastrophically, likely the time you'll discover it's failing is when you're reading it. What do you read the whole drive? When you're backing it up. So you're halfway through doing a backup, ov

  • New Concept. (Score:5, Funny)

    by texatut ( 144946 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:50PM (#9091205)
    "but I have no idea what I should be looking for."

    A printer.

  • Store it on a hard drive! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:51PM (#9091208)
    I suppose the best thing to do, with constantly reducing prices for hard drives, is to build a RAID machine with about a terabyte of space available and store all the movies there. Then, they can be served to devices around your house.

    In fact, I think a set-top style box (though still a rather big one, at least now) could be built to do exactly what consumers need. And with increasing Internet bandwidths, it would be really cool if you could buy a movie with your remote control and have it delivered and stored on your system at home. If only the big few could get past their DRM-inducing fears and offer a reasonable way for consumers to do this. I believe that if this were offered with music, back when the whole Napster thing started, downloading stuff for free might have been a fringe weird geek sort of activity, because most reasonable people would have an easy way to get perfect recordings every time for a small payment. Hopefully the movie industry won't be so blind to this gaping wide business opportunity as to cause themselves the same problem, and eventually ruin technology for everyone by making it decide what we are and aren't allowed to do.

  • Depends (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:55PM (#9091221)

    Too many variables. Some can print the CD after burning it. (Print the CD, not apply a label which is a bad idea) Some are completely automated, just stick a stack in, hit run, and come back latter to a stack of burned CDs. Some are faster than others.

    If your quantities are large enough you will find that pressing the disks just like the big music guys to is cheapest. Unless you are really really big this is an outsourced operation. Even if pressing doesn't make sense, it might make sense to outsource to someone who can do it for you.

    For dirt cheap it is hard to beat turning an old PC with a burner into your station.

    Start by defining your needs. Do you need labels? How many do you need, over what time period? How often are you likely to change what is on the CD? How cheap is labor in your area? How much human attention can you afford to give each burn? What will you be doing after the burn is done?

    The answers will define what you need in a solution. They may even define the divide between burning in house and outsourcing.

  • Plextor (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yoweigh116 ( 185130 ) <yoweigh@gmail. c o m> on Friday May 07, 2004 @10:56PM (#9091226) Homepage Journal
    For a good few years I've stuck with Plextor [plextor.com] products for my CD-R/RW drives. They've been dependable and I've never had a problem with them. I have an old 12x SCSI burner in one of my systems that hasn't made a single hiccup in 4 years. I don't think it's made a single coaster, and that was before they had buffer underrun protection. Their DVD burners are most likely just as good, if that's your cup up fea. I highly recommend them. -Yoweigh

    • I'd like to confirm this. I have a SCSI PlexWriter 12/10/32S, burnt 3000+ CDRs with it and it never failed me once. I just bought a Plextor DVD burner a few days ago, hoping it will be just as good. Don't know about their media though...

  • Forget CDrot -Flea bombs are CD killers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by azav ( 469988 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:00PM (#9091241) Homepage Journal
    I had a former roommate who brought a nice but flea infested leather couch into my house.

    My legs are crack for fleas.

    Before calling an exterminator, I flea bombed the house with those flea/insect foggers. Several CDs that I left out were covered in a haze that made them unusable. The purchased audio CDs did not have the printed surface compromised but the silver computer CD-ROMs had the silver peel off.

    I was able to use chrome polish (Welon) and a towel to restore the Music CDs so I could rip them but the Burned CDs were gone for good.

    Be warned if you ever flea bomb your house and leave CDs out. And be careful with your choice of roommates.

    • I had 2 CD's that were left out a few years ago when a fleabombing was done. I just used one of those CD restorers on them and havent had a problem with them since.

  • I like to manually re-copy just important stuff (Score:3, Informative)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:21PM (#9091319) Homepage
    I tend to make lots of CDR backups, so about once a year I like to create a directory of the "best stuff" on backup CDRs, then burn this directory to 2 new CDRs - this helps avoid bit-rot and gives me an additional optimized backup set where it is easier to find stuff. I like to also occasionally store these newer backups at relative's houses (off site backup :-)

    Anyway, this may sound like a nuisance to do, but this scheme works for me.

    -Mark

  • A good duplicator (Score:4, Funny)

    by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:26PM (#9091333)
    What you should be looking for is a CD/DVD duplicator that's based on RIAA math [theregister.co.uk].... You know, ones that "run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x...," ones that are "well above the average speed." That way, your duplicator will be the equivalent of 421 burners [arstechnica.com].

  • The value of a CD Duplicator Unit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeDawg ( 721537 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:31PM (#9091351) Homepage Journal

    Being a former DJ (using CDs), I never understood the beauty of units that you could just plug in, and copy cd to cd (ala CD Duplicator). The one caveat I list to this, is that they are overpriced, and often times run more than $300. But none the less, one day while DJing, I had a DJ from another club (same owners, different locations) come in, and show me some of his new CDs, and showed me what was really hot and so on. In an instant, he went to his car, grabed his duplicator, and some CD-Rs and burnt me copies, real quick like. It was beautiful to have an on-site on-location CD duplication. If I could have afforded the equipment, I would have bought one myself (even after seeing the somewhat rediculous prices of the equipment).

    CD Duplicators can come in real handy, in situations you wouldn't believe!

    • I have on-site CD duplication too: a laptop.

      I am the sound engineer for a university choir. Many days I announce that I'll be bringing my laptop to rehearsal, and will sit around before/after practice churning out copies of recordings people need.

      • While I am no computer novice, I will speak for the computer illiterates (sp?). Plugging a small, simple unit (smaller than 8"^3) and inserting one cd in the top try, and inserting a blank cd in the bottom tray, and pressing one of the two buttons located on the unit is purely simple. The ability to have the power of CD duplication in a unit that has no more than 4 buttons on it is quite nice when working with people that aren't famliar with computers. Also, as I refer back to my DJ job, I could actually

  • Piracy and Legitimacy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TechnoFreek ( 758758 ) <technofreek@nOspAm.fastmail.fm> on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:53PM (#9091427) Homepage
    I work for a business that duplicates CDs and DVDs. We have a bunch of autloading/burning/printing machines from companies like Primera. We can burn around 1500-2000 CDs daily. Mostly for places like banks or H&R Block. Anyways, www.primera.com has autoloaders and such available for purchase. Those machines work pretty well, although they take up quite a bit of the windows resources at work. I think they have mac compatible machines, but haven't checked in a while.

  • Build a Terabyte Array! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FsG ( 648587 ) on Friday May 07, 2004 @11:57PM (#9091446)
    If you're going to be investing large amounts of money into a good CD/DVD duplicator, why not consider building a RAID 5+0 terabyte server [finnie.org] instead? For $1600, it makes for an excellent backup solution; the array is fault-tolerant so even in the unlikely event that a hard drive fails, you lose nothing. Throw in a gigabit ethernet card, and you'll be able to quickly & easily copy things on and off the server.

    IMHO, it beats the pants off re-burning a huge stack of CD's every year, while praying that none of them turned out to have a lifetime of 364 days.

    • All the digital photographs taken by my family,
      are on both the main data partition of our hard drive (which we access frequently) and an external firewire maxtor 160 gb, which I monthly or so copy over from the data partition.
      in case of fire, my wife knows to 1-grab the kid, 2-grab the turtle 3- grab the maxtor, just pull it away from the desk

      I've also told her to drop the turtle in the backyard before the firemen get to the house (not legal in my state)
      who's gonna grab your ten drive bay box with

      • I've just moved to a new country and not really set up yet. But i figure i'll go down the RAID route but keep a couple of 250 GB external firewire drives such that i'll keep one live and sync'd with my data, but always leave one of them in my filing cabinet in the office - maybe switch them round every week.

        For smaller amounts of data i've previously used an offsite rsync - you can get a reciprocal agreement going wiht a friend. But that doesn't cut it when you've got lots of huge images.

        I've even had sin
      • Medium sized, fire-resistant (3-4 hours) safes only cost about $300-400. I don't know how your house is laid out, but at my place getting that drive would mean heading to the opposite end of the house, and probably going past the fire. Not bloody likely to happen unless we catch it early, in which case we have fire extinguishers handy in key locations.
        [PSA: Fire extinguishers start at $8. There's no good excuse for not having one or more in your house.]

  • replicator not needed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by __aaitqo8496 ( 231556 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @12:07AM (#9091494) Journal
    if it's data you need to archive but won't be accessing often, what about a simple solution such as an air-tight opaque box. without light or humidity, i would guess the discs would last much longer. after a certin point (x years), just bring up some handy disc copying software and copy for garunteed freshness!
    • Someone really should do a detailed study on failure rates for optical media.

      Stuff like:

      -How do humidity, temperature, and the presence of light affect deterioration rates?

      -What does the failure rate vs. time look like? Mean-life isn't the only important statistic you need to know when designing a system.

      -How exactly do disks fail? Does the whole disk go at once, or do you only lose a few bits here and there?

      -How do the lifetimes of cdrs vs. "real" cd's differ?

      -Is there any way to detect deterioration
      • Yeah, but there are hard problems:

        * It's a pretty good guess that media vary a lot. So maybe after a five year study, you conclude that the longest-lived disks are a particular variant of Sony-sold discs. It's even odds that Sony isn't making that exact brand of media anymore, and hasn't for years.

        * It's really not possible to do very good real-world testing -- you have to do accelerated aging or something, as a seventy-five year test not takes forever, but wouldn't be useful at the terminus. Accelerat
        • Well, we have good computer archival media. A RAID array with replacing disks that die should be able to maintain huge quantities with little investment.

          The only problem is that it requires an input of energy to do so. Someone's got to keep swapping out disks as they die. All storage solutions are like that--we've got no *single* durable storage object. Everything relies on redundancy and the replacement of bad media.

          I suppose the most durable things used nowadays are vinyl records...

  • cheap, single duplicators are useful (Score:3, Informative)

    by bbdd ( 733681 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @12:56AM (#9091675)
    look, if you have any more than a few hundred disks total, do what others are recommending and find some sort of hard drive storage system: raid, a couple of external usb drives, whatever.

    but, even though i have cd and dvd burners in my computers, it is really quite useful to have a cheap, single disk duplicator handy. i have one i bought a few years back, at a target store (a discount store), no less.

    something like this [runtechmedia.net]. that's ony $150, similar to what i paid. its very useful to not have to tie up my machine when i'm running some quick copies.

    and, they are so dead-simple to use, your non-computer literate friends and family can do it themselves. for example, my mom can't use a computer to save her life, but she owns a single disk duplicator and can use it without my help.
  • If the size of your cd archive is large enough, there will be a point that >=1 cd will fail everyday. Archive renewal will then be a continous process of checking/copying/discarding cds. It's better off to stay with more stable media than continously spending time/money on this IMO.

  • I had plans awhile back.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kc0dby ( 522118 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @01:21AM (#9091740) Homepage
    Because of the high prices of duplicators, and the fact that I would have liked to be able to just feed the machine a bunch of blank disks and a couple of spindles of used disks, with different instructions for each disk to be copied, I came up with an interesting plan. I'd post a link if I could handle the slashdot effect, but you might be able to find something similar.

    Basically, the idea was to use a 4'x8' table, a mini-ITX case with a bunch of external drives (some readers, some burners, depending on your needs) and an Automation Direct [automationdirect.com] PLC with serial communication capability to set up a "pick and place" type system that could easily be scripted. I lost my motivation before I had the $2k it probably would have taken me to do it, but the plan was pretty solid.

    I think the motivation behind it was an interesting ice cream vending machine I saw, which was more or less a box containing a consumer freezer, an arm to open the freezer, and a vacuum hose that would go to the proper coordinates, drop down, suck up the treat, and drop it into a chute.

    Just think of the possibilities though. Thousands of blanks, matched with thousands of sources. It'd make a nifty interface for archival and automated backups, etc.

  • Whoa... (Score:2, Informative)

    by sameyeam ( 587571 )
    It's going to be way too expensive to shell out for the sort of equipment you're looking for.

    Instead of running a complete backup every few years, why don't you do a rolling backup...say half a dozen copies a week, toss out the old copies and copy the next half a dozen from your collection the next week and so on. You'll still have a backup every few years, it's just that you're not doing the whole thing at once.
  • Seriously, why buy an expensive duplicator to reburn what, a few dozen discs, mebbe a coupla of hundred at most, every "few years"?...
    1. Make two or three copies of everything you REALLY want to keep (don't get lazy and save everything, show a bit of judgment.)
    2. Figure out some sort of indexing strategy so you can find stuff later. Don't get all fancy, consider portable like a flat text file listing materials and what CDs they're on.
    3. Keep one set someplace convenient, but fairly well secured, temperature controlled, not damp, etc. Send off the other copies to elsewhere under like conditions.
    4. Once a year check all the caches of materials and test-read some samples. Take the opportunity to add what's new, update the indexes, etc.
    5. Every n-years send the whole lot out for duplication to whatever is the format du jure. Don't get stuck with punch cards / paper tape / reel to reel magtapes / laser disks / IBM PC to cassette tape / Bournelli disks / magneto-optical / and soon CDs, keep up with the times.
    Face it, CDR production is already winding down as industry prepares to move to DVDR. A few years after that it'll be ???. Don't get locked in to any of those, instead spend your effort on keeping your files in portable formats, searchable, and secure. Mediums will come and go, bits can be forever.

    • Every 6 months or so, I make a complete backup onto DVD-Rs. These days with 8x DVD-R burners and blank media going for $0.50, its just easier making backup copies onto DVD-Rs. Inbetween the 6 months, I backup if I have over 4.35gig of new stuff to backup and burn that.

      That way you have a 'rotating' backup copy of your current items, as well as all your old backup copies.

      RAID is a decent way to keep a systems FS up and running, but its no backup. I've had ATA cards and controlers take out whole HDD arrays
    • # Make two or three copies of everything you REALLY want to keep (don't get lazy and save everything, show a bit of judgment.)

      LOL. So you're saying I'm lazy and lack judgment?

      Seriously, there is no way to know what you REALLY want to keep. I organize my files by subject matter, not importance. Life is too short, and I'm too busy, to waste time and brain power on sorting out the important from the unimportant for backup.

  • Maybe I'm Weird (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kir ( 583 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @02:33AM (#9091941)
    Maybe I'm weird, but I find the HD a great backup medium. I don't have terabytes of shite I want to keep, but I do have about 80GB worth (slowly growing of course). This 80GB is made up of mostly iso images, movies, mp3s (mostly ripped, newer ones purchased from allofmp3.com), etc. It currently sits on a 120GB HD. When I bought this drive, I bought two. One for the stuff and one for the backup. Once every two weeks, a short cron job mounts the backup drive's partitions in /tmp, and throws rsync at the live stuff.

    Now, this helps a lot with the "Jeesh I'm a dumbass" rm -rf scenario. If I don't remember within two weeks (or two days or whatever is left on the cycle) that I did a rm -rf on something I shouldn't have, well... Of course, if I did the rm -rf a few seconds before the cron job kicks off... OK... screwed.

    When my 120GB drive gets close to full, I'll purchase two 200GB or two 280GB (or whatever) HDs and continue on. This has worked very well for me.

    Oh yeah... If you set the backup drive to spin down, you'll feel good. hdparm is cool.

    I am weird I guess.
  • The obvious answer to every /. reader: Legos

  • Archival quality CD/DVD blanks (Score:4, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday May 08, 2004 @02:54AM (#9092000) Homepage
    There are archival quality CD blanks. [mitsuicdr.com] They use phthalocyanine dyes, which require a slower writing rate but last longer. But the blanks are about $1.50 to $2.00 each, and are not widely available.

    Mitsui claims that their new dye formulation for their DVD-R and DVD+R blanks has a >100 year life, but they don't offer any independent information to back that up.

  • Is an IDE CD changer. They've had 100+ disc cd changers around for years, and they're only about the size of a computer case. It couldn't be that hard, just use the changer mechanism instead of a tray and have standard burner optics. I've often done a dozen or so cds at a time (archiving downloaded tv shows i've watched untill i get a larger HD) and would just like to Set It and Forget It! (tm) instead of coming back every 5 minutes and swapping discs and clicking the next list to burn.

  • My CD writing strategy and photo workflow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hucke ( 55628 ) * on Saturday May 08, 2004 @08:43AM (#9092710) Homepage
    I photograph graveyards [graveyards.com] using a Nikon D100 camera body, which on the medium quality setting produces 1.5-2MB JPG's. On a good day I'll shoot six to seven hundred images - 2 CD's worth. As I want these photos to survive my own death and someday be on file in the local historical society, I'm very concerned about their longevity.

    Each night after I return from a photo expedition, I'll immediately copy the contents of the compact flash cards onto my Windows machine. They are stored there with a minimum of organization - just a directory named for the date. I then FTP them to the Linux machine, leaving a copy behind (plenty of disk space on the Windows machine).

    On the Linux machine, on a 160GB disk that's used for almost nothing else, I'll sort the day's photos by location, putting them in subdirectories and adding a prefix to each filename based on the location (but leaving the image's original sequence number intact); this ensures that every file has a unique name even if the directories are munged together - something like "calvary/calvary7932.jpg"). I'll then group these directories together into lots of slightly under 650MB - depending on productivity, one day's work will fill either one or two CD's - write a text file as an index for each, and burn them.

    My shell script wrapper for cdrecord will mount and list the contents of the disk after the burn is complete, allowing me to visually verify that it was successful. This has been useful, as on at least two occasions cdrecord recorded success but the disk would not mount.

    At least five copies will be made of each, on different manufacturer's media, and stored in different locations. Currently, the media I'm using are Sony, Memorex, K-Hypermedia, Maxell Black, and Maxell Pro. These last are much more expensive but promise superior quality - time will tell if this is true.

    The disks are stored in several locations - one copy of each into a sleeve in a binder, other copies storied upright in slim cases in various lightproof CD drawers in different rooms; a complete set is also at my parents' house in another city, and a friend in a nearby town will also be hosting a copy as soon as I drive out there with it.

    I have a strict rule - no matter how tired I am, the Flash cards do not get erased until after I have written and verified at least one CD.

    The images also remain on the 160GB drive in their original forms, and also in a parallel directory structure where everything has been resized (via shell scripts invoking gimp) to 600x400.

    By next year I'll likely acquire a DVD-writer and make additional copies on DVD, again with the quintuple redundancy on different manufacturer's media. Five dollars isn't too much to spend to ensure the survival of a full day's work!

    And a few years later, the process will be repeated with whatever replaces DVD's...

  • Combined with the story that someone is starting to make paper discs, I'd say a xerox machine would work quite nicely :)

    -JT

  • Don't buy it! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EightBits ( 61345 )
    I don't buy this optical storage crap. They said my Commodore 64 5.25" floppies had a maximum life of ten years and that after that the data would be too corrupt to read. I just pulled out my C64 again a couple of years ago. Today, I put in my old Telengard disk from 1983 (haven't used it since about 1986-7) and damn if that bitch still loads! Granted, for my inner paranoid dillusional side, I do make duplicates, but the short lifespan we're hearing about with optical media sounds bogus to me. The only

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