What are you using for CD/DVD backups?

Why don't you just use the built in windows cd writing stuff?

DBurner is free and works pretty well.

https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home
Is what I use. This is what ADK had pre-loaded when I had my PC built and it has always worked well.

If you are using the Nero "BurningROM" application, it hasn't changed for ages.  What you have is probably the same as the current version in Nero 2015.

Thanks, everybody. I'll have another look at ImgBurn, which I tried long ago and didn't like for some now-forgotten reason. I'll also check out all the other suggestions. In the meantime, I'll just continue to use Windows Explorer's built-in burn feature, which, primitive as it is, will at least let me catch up on my growing list of pending backups.
 

arachnaut is totally wrong on this.  USB Flash drives are NOT a reliable form of backup and you should never consider using them for that purpose. I have seen many a flash drive fail for no reason.
 
Hard drives are good but DVD is an excellent backup option.  eg whatever you have backed up on a drive should be on a DVD somewhere as well. I don't like the dual layer DVD's though. The standard 4.7G version is very stable.  I still use NERO and every DVD it produces opens up perfectly on any computer.  (in my case I have DVD's that are 15 years or more old and they are still perfect)
 
I run a business doing this and have to be able to restore sessions at one time or another.  Hard drives fail as well and the DVD has saved my bacon more than once.
 

bitflipper
I only care about data backups (sample libraries) - not copying movies, authoring audio CDs or making slideshows.  

I have seen this thread pop up a few times and assumed making CDs/DVDs until I read the OP again ("backups" kept sticking out). Backup CDs are scary to me anymore, since most of them have the media on the label side (i.e. not encased in plastic, so scratching the label side ruins the media... scratch the other side and you have to deal with that too!)
 
External USB3 drives are now so tiny you can put them in your pocket, hold 500GB-1TB, and relatively cheap. Just the time involved with "burning a CD/DVD" makes them less desirable to an external HDD. For backups, I have been using 2 of these and running xcopy/robocopy to update files during my backup cycles, which is something that is definitely worth considering as an alternative. From a monetary/waste perspective the external drive also will win in the long run.

Responding mainly to Jeff, because have used USB drives more and more for external backup and never had a problem, except for overwrite fuk ups.
 
Got my main data archived to either USB sticks or larger external hard drives. And hard drives may fail, as much as a DVD can bleach out and fail.
 
My problem, with increasing data size, even DVD doesn't hold enough, and fully support your claim that the hi density DVD's are unreliable, and expensive to turn into coffee cup toasters.
 
Overwrite errors are the main risk of incremental backups on USB devices. You have a 10GB file that you have added to and updated the previous archive. Save the new archive and something is forked up, and you have replaced the one that works.
 
DVD carved in stone so you can go back to the hard copy.
 
My crystal ball going forward...
 
CD and DVD is relatively soon a dead medium, meaning maybe in anyone's lifetime reading this. Limitation in capacity, inevitable change in Red Book standard. Mostly however because it is spinning around. Bridge toward the future, but doomed because it is lower level mechanical device requiring so many RPM's of motion..
 
Next generation will be all on chips or USB 5 sticks up the line. Medium is static and a laser or whatever scans the stationary device.
 
Nostalgia crap...  Back in the dark ages of vinyl 33's. The damn things burned out as fast as you could scar them with your worn stylus in the turntable, but holding the elegant giant graphics in front of you was part of the rush.
 
Cassette and CD reduced the graphic.
 
Soon, we'll have a less than 1 inch square shrink wrapped chip with every pristine video, ad, offers, toolbars for the browser, tracking software. Eventually we will find the music in the mess somewhere.
 
Still miss the safety and simplicity of the defective vinyl disc. Especially miss the big pictures on the LP jacket.
 
John
 

Dstrenz,
 
Not wanting to derail this thread, but could you expand opinion about the ASUS modem.
 
I have something ancient going into an even more ancient Netgear wireless, which is and has been causing multiple problems. Friend said my problem is in the antiquity of the system. Get with Asus.
 
Your thoughts appreciated...
 
John
 

I would like to relate a bit more about my experiences with storage devices.
 
Several years ago I had 2 firewire 800 external drives. There must have been a firmware error in the Firewire controller for this model because I went through about 13 of these drives over a period of about 10 months and finally I took them apart and just used the bare drives (which continue to work fine to this day).
 
I had about 10 terabytes of storage and the error rate on these kinds of rotational drives is such that I probably will always have a bit error somewhere in there. So I made a set of Windows scripts using md5deep to create a data base of all the hashes of every file on a drive (actually it was more general - any drive, any folder, or any file). Anyone who wants a copy of these can have them for the asking.
 
Using these I can tell if the data changes on any drive.
 
Now about flash storage:
 
I have seen one case of a bit error on a cheap, freebie USB drive that a store gave away.
 
I have seen cases where a 32 GB drive only had 16 GB of data. I have seen USB 3 drives that run at USB 2 speeds.
 
I have about a dozen or more Patriot flash drives which are all I tend to get these days. I usually format them for using NTFS and I test them when I buy them - for proper speed, proper size, and if all bits are OK.
 
Amazon users report good results with these drives (594 posts, 435 are 5 stars):
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Supersonic-Series-Flash-PEF32GSRUSB/dp/B008R6OPJQ
 
The Flash drives I buy are warrantied for 5 years. Other than a few that failed right out of the box and got returned, I have not experienced any failures.
 
Now about CD/DVDs:
 
I have gone through a few CD/DVD drives over the past few years. I confess that the last one I bought was only about $20, so they may have all been poor. But I have taken some apart and they all seem to use the same assembly for the laser.
 
Many of my old CD/RW discs are no longer readable and these were probably only written once.
 
Several discs that I have burned at high speeds have failed, so I normally use the slowest speeds when I do this task (which I now do very rarely).
 
I do have maybe a hundred DVD movies and many Blu-Ray movies. I also take out a few DVDs from our library every week.
 
I would conjecture that maybe 1 in 10 or 20 of these video disks will glitch. Some just a simple one, others catastrophically. Checking them for visual defects sometimes reveals empty spots or thin spots where one can see through. (Recordable data disks, I know, are different, but this is still scary data to me).
 
Your mileage may vary, but I will never use CD/DVD for my backup data.
 
If you think solid state is unreliable, don't think about getting a solid state drive, or trust your tablet or smart phone.
 
I don't have a tablet or smart phone or anything that uses SSD drives, but many people do and the future is pretty easy to see.
 
Many new products don't have rotational devices (DVD or Hard drives) of any kind.
 
I believe that magnetic tape is still considered the best long term archival media.
 
 
 
 
 

Arachnaut,
 
Can unfortunately confirm that CD or DVD data discs burned and working years ago have on occasion failed. Worked at the time when they were stored and sealed in the dark. Something deteriorated outside of extreme environmental stress and resulted in data permanently lost.
 
Like the fact that a DVD stores a file that cannot be corrupted by overwriting it, but something can still go south. Not a failsafe medium by any means.
 
John

John, Your provider wants you to upgrade your cable modem? Our provider provides the modem and charges a monthly fee for it, whether we want it or not. The ASUS is a router which connects to the modem and lets you use multiple devices to connect to the internet and each other by physically connecting them to the router with cables and/or wireless.
 
Though there are Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and Staples about 5 miles from here, I usually buy things like this online. It beats going out in 9 degree weather and the prices are often lower. 

Anyone who relies on a single backup for important data is foolish. Simple as that.
 
We have so many options available for storage these days that the most important things should be backed up multiple times in multiple places to prevent loss.
 
CD/DVD - I stopped using this years ago when some important discs experienced disc rot (we didn't really know much about it at the time) and I lost it all. It's not a secure method of backing up data long term and if you're using single write discs, you are just contributing to the planets waste problem if what you're putting on them gets updated on a somewhat normal basis.
 
Flash Drive - I use these for transfer mostly. If I have anything stored on them, I make sure they are also stored on a HDD as well. I will say I've used a lot of flash drives and never had one fail. I find that spending a little more on a high quality brand goes a long way. I've ran my OCZ drives through the washer a couple times and they still work great.
 
HDD - I don't think this really needs much explaining. This computer I'm on now (not studio) has 10.5TB worth of HDDs in it. This includes my media server and backups. It's the most common way of storing data.
 
SSD - Until the point where they are affordable for high storage, I won't use them for backup drives.
 
Cloud - Quite possibly the greatest method for backing up data we have these days and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it. If you use a company that is reliable and secure, there is no reason why it shouldn't be used as a third backup option. If you're a MS Office 365 subscriber, you get unlimited data storage on OneDrive. Let that sink in for a moment... I pay $10.59/mo for Office and get unlimited cloud storage on MS servers. It won't be long now before other companies follow suit. Don't feel secure? Encrypt it. Very simple to make an encrypted container, load it full of whatever you're backing up and upload the container to the cloud.
 
Just some food for thought. :)

TerraSin
...
Cloud - Quite possibly the greatest method for backing up data we have these days and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it. If you use a company that is reliable and secure, there is no reason why it shouldn't be used as a third backup option. If you're a MS Office 365 subscriber, you get unlimited data storage on OneDrive. Let that sink in for a moment... I pay $10.59/mo for Office and get unlimited cloud storage on MS servers. It won't be long now before other companies follow suit. Don't feel secure? Encrypt it. Very simple to make an encrypted container, load it full of whatever you're backing up and upload the container to the cloud.
 
Just some food for thought. :)

I've thought a bit about Cloud storage and agree that data should be encrypted if you go that way.
 
The problem with that, for me at least, is that this is probably the slowest method of all.
 
I can download, maybe, 5MBps at a sustained clip. For terabytes of data, this is not so feasible. Uploading is much, much slower, so I'd need some sort of continuous backup to cloud for this to work, and I don't want anything like that running on my machine.
 
Ideally, I'd like to restore stuff in minutes, not days.
 
Then you'd need a tool to decrypt on-the-fly or you need to download the encrypted file and then decrypt which would require twice the data size and who know how much more time?
 
A lot depends on the size of the data pool we are talking about.
 
I tend to prefer partitioning my data sets on various drive volumes and backing up by volume. These volumes are typically 100 GB or more in size. The smallest volume is the OS/Boot data which is about 60 GB compressed. I can back this up and verify to a USB drive in about 15 minutes and restore via boot tools (Acronis on flash using YUMI) in about 10 minutes.
 
Also, when we use the term 'archive' - how long is the archival duration? If this is US Census data or something that doesn't change, perhaps forever is the answer.
 
But if this is program data (which can change weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly via updates) or sample data (which tend to grow and change a bit more slowly) I think we only need to backup monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Having a grandfathering policy of rotating the backup devices allows as many previous versions as we want. Since my OS backups are fast, I can eliminate restore points to reduce its size and backup the OS every week. It's quicker to restore an older version than debug a newly appearing problem.
 
Fast backup/restore speed and monolithic storage media (eg, not multiple devices for a single backup set) are key to having a good backup/maintenence process.
 
Most storage devices we have now probably will last 5-10 years. This is fine for what most of us need for audio work. Every 5 years or so we go through some radical upheavals in technology anyway.
 
In the past I used Omega Zip drives, SCSI DAT drives, 256-channel bulk tape cartridges - all now obsolete. I think CDs/DVDs are the next to go. My bets are on magnetic rotation hard drives and solid state memories for the next 5 years.
 
 
 
 

I use a combination of an external 1T bit hard drive and cloud storage and use Free File Sync to back up my files to both with one click.