Backing up on CD's? You should read this

[Izzy]

A year back I had an episode in which one of my cats got sick and got confused about where the litter box was. She decided to use my rubbermaid container holding thousands of CDs as her litter box. It was insult to injury and I was origially angry about the whole ordeal until I started backing them up using Magic ISO to a external hard drive. I found lots of CDs that were dead and not because the cat urine. They were dead because they became unstable and began to rust from within. That's right rust...

Plus after that the cat died and I ended being the one in the family who had to bury her (like always)

Fast forward to today. I now back up all serious data to 2 mirrored 1TB drives. This means if one dies I still have all my stuff on another drive. This also means when I kill one I can just install the new drive of the same type and it will automatically rebuild the new drive to match the old one.

Here is an interesting article on Cd and DVD life spans. These things are not nearly as durable as you might think. I have seen discs that look perfect be corrupted.

Understanding CD-R & CD-RW - Disc Longevity

[mad editor]

Yah! I'm backing up to an external hard drive and to mozy.com.
I've had problems getting data off old CDs. No more CD backups for me.