Digital BW, The Print

I've had CD/DVD failures, too. But I've also had hard drive failures that have combined with the failure of the backup program and resulted in unrecoverable data loss.

I use Mirror Folder for backing up (it's rather complex) and twice I've had unreadable data on the source disc - and then found that the mirror disc has also lost not just the corrupted data, but folders of tens of GBs of data, for no apparent reason. (It was set to backup any deleted files and keep the backups for two weeks but is now set to keep such files for three months, as I now know that I might not see an error within two weeks. And I'm no longer letting it delete unmatched files.) 

So ... although hard drives are easier and cheaper, even with hard drives, one has to be very careful about the ramifications of the options chosen in the backup software, and have more than one backup copy. And check the program is working as intended, regularly - something it is easy to fail to find time to do.

Any further suggestions would be appreciated from me, too.

thanks,
Richard

Richard Smallfield Photography 
http://richardsmallfield.com