[Coco] CF and SD life expectancy

[gene heskett]

On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 09:05:27 AM Jay Coleman did opine:

>   On 7/24/2011 8:34 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> > On 25/07/2011 11:13 AM, Roger Taylor wrote:
> >> It's the "could" part that I'd like to see demonstrated. Not that I
> >> don't
> >> believe a memory card has a life span like all the other types of
> >> media, but
> >> I think some people worry far too much over this issue.
> > 
> > That's just it though - people will worry more about the 'could' if it
> > pertains to their entire collection, rather than 4 games... regardless
> > of the realities.
> > 
> >> I'm more worried about why my DVDs and CDs just quit working one day
> >> when
> >> there has been no abuse, no warping, no mishandling, no scratching of
> >> any
> >> sort, and why a spindle of brand new expensive dual-layer DVDs bought
> >> at Wal-Mart almost always contains 2 glitch discs.
> > 
> > I have CDs burned less than 10 years ago that I can't read. I have
> > DVDs burned less than 5 years ago that I can't read. I have a spindle
> > of DVDs that I bought about 2 years ago that mostly won't burn at all.
> > 
> > I'd *never* trust any archival function to optical media atm. I'm
> > really hanging on some sort of 100% reliable, permanent archival
> > medium, because even backing up to two HDD still makes me nervous! :(
> 
> Then you are stuck with tape.  Expensive (at least for the drives),
> slow, but very reliable tape.
> 
> Jay
> 
Buckets of years ago, there was an amiga videotape backup system, called 
VBS.

This worked by translating the data into a black and white video image at 
about a 250 kilobaud data rate, so the individual bit was a good inch long 
on a 15" monitor, and you could record it on a std home vcr.  As there was 
considerable redundency and reed-soloman error correction in the multiple 
fields that were recorded, it was very data dependable if slow, 85 
megabytes an hour in the original 8 mhz cpu machine.  I don't recall now 
how much data could be put on a 2 hour tape, but I still have the hardware 
adapter and at least a dozen tapes from those days, using it until I could 
get a QIC drive, which I still have along with a shelf off tapes.

The author, Hugo Lippens, still has a web page at 
<http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html> where he claims 85 megabytes an hour 
on an 8mhz 68000 cpu.  But I don't see any buy or contact buttons.
There is an original amiga version 3.0 for sale on ebid, for 10 pounds 
sterling.  Won't run on a 6x09 of course.

Here, I have added a 2nd 1Gb scsi hard drive, os9 formatted of course since 
that's all I run, and I just dsave the main drive to it whenever I have 
updated the nitros9 install.

For dw users, dsaving to a disk image file on the pc is probably the least 
trouble as it can then be part of the regularly scheduled backups like I do 
every night with *amanda here on this linux box, using amanda with virtual 
tapes on a terrabyte hard drive.

*amanda = Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver.  A oretty 
decent program, it scans the drive for new stuff and builds its own backup 
schedule every night, and typically takes about 1.5 hours to backup 20 to 
40 Gb of data, usually about 20 Gb after gzip -best gets done.

Cheers, gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The things that interest people most are usually none of their business.