It pays to be safe
Since picking up my USB Freeview stick just over a year ago, I’ve amassed a good 150 hours or more of television programmes. Most of this consists of programmes of which I am a regular viewer, such as Casualty, Holby City and Trial & Retribution, but also the odd one-off like Five Go Mad in Dorset. The downside to this rigorous (anal) cataloguing of my TV viewing is the amount of disc space required - broadly speaking, around 1.5 GB per hour of material.
Until recently, I’ve generally been relying on recordable media to store it all, as it became clear fairly quickly that I couldn’t store everything on my PC’s hard drive in perpetuity. Last week, however, I came to the conclusion that a far more economical (in terms of both money and space) solution would be to buy a dedicated external hard drive. So, over to Maplin Electronics I went to pick up what gave me the best trade-off between cost, disc space and brand name - a Western Digital Elements 400 GB drive. (I used to be a Maxtor customer, but I no longer buy from them after my brother’s experiences.)
Above: You mean you don’t give your disk drives names? |
The drive arrived yesterday, and I now wish I’d done this sooner instead of relying on something as volatile as cheap DVD-R media. While I was able to salvage most of my recordings, several discs ended up putting quite a strain on my DVD drive, which struggled to read data closer to the outer edges (luckily, mine isn’t the only DVD drive in the house, and, as I’ve tended to find, where one fails another may succeed), one was suffering from a fairly advanced stage of disc rot, meaning that the final hour or so of material was completely unreadable, while another was a complete write-off thanks to the dye from the top appearing to have actually seeped through on to the readable area.
So please, take it from me: if you routinely back your data up, I wouldn’t recommend relying on bulk-bought DVD-Rs. And I certainly recommend keeping regular backups. While I can’t say I’ve ever experienced any major disasters regarding my data (the only time a hard drive ever failed on me, I was given plenty of prior warning and had time to salvage my data several weeks before it went completely belly-up), you can never be too careful.
Personally, I’d prefer to just keep buying external hard drives. Once I’ve filled this one up, I’ll move on to another. To store the same amount of data on DVDs probably wouldn’t cost much less, would occupy considerably more physical space and wouldn’t be half as safe.
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