Photography Thailand Forum

[Marc Schultz]

I came across this:

http://www.photoshelter.com/land/1tb

It suggests that their solution of a server based backup for digital photos is the best since backing up to DVD is expensive.

In my opinion, DVD is a very inexpensive solution and a lot less expensive than the solution they are offering, although not very stable I have found. Basically, I don't find DVD backup to be a secure option as I think I mentioned before as I have had DVD read failures.

I only rely upon hard disks and having two sets, one for original and one for backup and I backup on a weekly basis. Using multiple hard disks is not expensive and by backing up locally, access to your picture files will be much quicker than storing them somewhere online.

An interesting and useful point they make though is that hard disks fail on average every 4 years. There is some truth to this and I think it is worth noting because many people never backup their hard disks to a second hard disk and then when that failure comes along they are caught very off guard.

My point is it is definately worth getting a second hard disk to backup your digital photos if all you have is one copy of your digital photos on one single hard drive.

[Chris Savery]

500 GB / $600/yr. Are they off their rockers? You can buy your own drives twice over for less than that.

Hard disks are cheap enough now that it is a good idea to have one/some dedicated to backups.

And since discussing backups I wanted to add a point about DVDs too...

I have had trouble with them in the past as they often seemed to read back with errors even within a year of being made. I recently did a lot of research on the DVD quality issues and found this site which has a lot of details regarding this: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

After using low-end DVDs for some time and then reading through this info I decided to test my DVDs with KProbe and see how they came up. Well, the cheap discs are really bad for internal error rates. And some good names are just as bad. eg. I got a pack of TDK discs that should have been good but they had very poor figures as well, and sometimes failures to burn.

With further research I finally found discs that are not too expensive, test well and have so far been extremely good. Which ones? Well, not much of a surprise I guess - Verbatim. They are made by Mitsubishi, have extremely good internal error rates, never have failed to burn and claim to have very long life spans. If you are backing up now to cheap Pantip discs then I would suggest you reconsider and only use Verbatim in future.

The cheapest Princos run about 500 baht/50 at Pantip, the TDK I bought were about 750 baht/50. The Verbatim are about 800 baht/50. That's from 10 baht each to 16 baht each. But I have many Princo that won't read even a year after creation. Maybe I'm the only one who used cheap media but for those out there who do as well - beware - it ain't worth it. DVDs are the cheapest solution but save yourself some aggravation in the future and don't use the rock bottom cheapest possible.

[Marc Schultz]

All very good info Chris. Thanks for that.

I have actually had problems with Sony on read back, which were supposed to be the best I had heard. After that is when I stopped using DVD for any long term backup.

Lately I have been using Philips to burn pictures for clients and have not had any burn problems at all. I buy them because I like how they have a plain white surface which is easy to write on and does not show through with a logo if you were to put a label over them. They are actually designed to be printed on, but I never do. As for the long term read back quality, I would have no idea and don't plan to use them for any kind of backup storage.

[Chris Savery]

Ya, I used some Sony ones too that I bought at BigC and they had error rates almost as bad as the Princo. Very disappointed in them. Turns out according to that site mentioned above that Sony discs are made by another manufacturer. There are only a few "good" DVD factories and Mitsubishi and Taiyo Yuden are amongst the few.

[bjorn slis]

My experiences:
Princo - more than 50% failure on verifying just after burning (do not buy!)
Verbatim, less problems right after burning but two or three months later a lot of them failed to read.
TDK same as Verbatim.
Philips almost no problems with those, but expensive.
A friend of mine sends Emtec from holland, they are very cheap and I never had any problems with them but I don't know if they are available here.

I back up on harddisk and DVD. And the most important work on 2 HD's and DVD
I can't wait for affordable Blue Ray Disks (or decent file comprssion software :-))

[Marc Schultz]

Good info Bjorn.

I did a test on the Philips DVDs I have been using with the free DVD Identifier software that you can download from the link Chris provided as I was curious where they were really made.

Interestingly the Philips DVDs come up as being the lowest quality of the 3rd Class media made by InfoMedia in Taiwan. So they are not actually made by Philips and it seems Philips doesn't actually make any of their own DVD media according to that link.

I also tested the Sony's I was using which actually seemed to have some readback problems in the past and the disc I tested (although I am not certain if it is from the same batch as the one that had the readback problem) it came up as being an actual Sony made DVD and appears to be 1st Class media.

My conclusion is that you can have problems with all classes of DVD media, that DVD media is not very stable in general, either for short or long term storage, and why I stopped using it for a back-up solution all together for some time already.

[Chris Savery]

Apparently the Emtec were made by Ricoh. But there are also often fakes made by low-end factories that get out into the market and it makes it very hard to tell what you have - especially here where stuff can find it's way in the market through various devious channels. The Verbatim that I had very good results with were actually brought from Canada by my Dad as they were on sale at Future shop there for a price lower than here. So I asked him to bring a couple stacks in his luggage. So far I could not say if the ones bought here would give the same results. I did check that they were exactly the same product code here - but again you never really know if they aren't fakes. The bad TDKs I had I suspected were actually fakes or perhaps they have just gone downhill. Anyway, I plan to run error scans on my Verbatim in a few months and monitor if they are standing up or not. Personally I have also felt for a long time that for important stuff it's better to have hard drive backups - which is the opposite of the traditional backup wisdom that optical media was the way to go.

[Paul Whitehead]

I use Photoshelter. It makes a lot of sense to me, 10gigs for 9.99$ a month, incl the sales software. Thats 350 baht a month for the peace of mind that your best stuff is always safe no matter if the house burns down. If I did it agin though I would probably use Digital Railroad (450 US per year I think) because they have a very active buyers market so theres also the chance of it paying for itself while you sleep.

[Marc Schultz]

The problem with all these online storage facilities Paul is that it would take an awfully long time to pull down all of your data if you wanted to once you have it all uploaded. They also really don't offer much space if you are talking about 10GIG which is about as much as two DVDs. As much as I am against using DVDs for storage, if I only had 10 gigabytes to store then multiple copies of the data backed up on DVD could be a simpler solution. Most people are dealing with 300 or 400 GIG or more that they need to store. In my case it is much much more than that unfortunately.

Chris, I am not sure that on fakes they would be bothering to mimic the manufacturer media ID numbers since probably very few people are running them through a DVD Identifier program. So I would tend to believe if the media ID code coincides with brand of the DVD on the big brands like Sony, TDK, and Verbatim then you probably got the real thing.

[Chris Savery]

Actually in my reading on this it turns out that the low-end bad disc factories specifically put good media ids on so that others will think they have a good disc. I know not many people check them but the ones who do are often times in charge of buying or selecting for other buyers. They have a section about fakes on that page. Also sometimes factories will fake the id to improve compatibility with writing software. I think they note there that Princo used to ship discs with a TDK id so it would work better in some drives. They mention the problem is mostly on eBay, in flea markets (which I think Pantip in some cases may be like) and online.

cdfreaks.com is a forum that discusses all this stuff. I have only rarely dropped in there as really, once you know they're not that reliable who wants to spend their life studying it all - unless I guess you work in that field.

[Marc Schultz]

Thanks Chris. Not such encouraging news for those trying to find something reliable in the vast world of optical storage media.

[Chris Savery]

Indeed. You know, in that sense DVD is kind of a failed media format. I read an article once about a company in LA that has rooms full of hundreds of DVD players. Their business is just testing Hollywood movie titles to see which ones it plays on and doesn't. Kind of a quality evaluation. I guess they pushed this format out before it was really solid, in my opinion. I think it pushes the edge a bit too much in reliability. Lets hope some of these newer formats prove to be much better.

[Marc Schultz]

Out of curiosity I just tested one from another batch of Philips DVDs I bought. This one came up as being made by Ritek, but the Media ID is R05, which unfortunately is not on the list on that link you provided. A number of other Ritek Media IDs do show up in the class 2 section though, which would suggest that at least this batch might be better quality than the other batch of Philips I had bought which were made by a factory in Taiwan that was rated as bottom of the barrel of the class 3 section.

[Gary Dublanko]

I do not think online stroage sites are suitable or designed for professionals or advanced ametuers with hundreds of gb of data. As Marc said, it would take a long time to do a complete restore. I've always used external hard drives for back ups but I've been wondering about offsite storage or at least something secure from fire and theft and I'm considering purchasing a fireproof safe where I can store the back up drives and then take them out once a week for back ups.

[Chris Savery]

How about a safety deposit box at a bank? Seems like a good place to put a drive or bundle of DVDs. The temperature tends to be more consistent too, which I think is one reason we have problems with DVDs. I know that longevity ratings for DVDs are based on 25C and every degree above is fairly significant in premature aging.

I know even in Bangkok it's fairly easy to open get a safety deposit box. I asked about it once and they seemed to only require from a farlang that you have a long term visa or can show you plan to stay long term as they must have had trouble before with tourists opening boxes and then vanishing all the time. I think the cost was only about 100 baht/mo or something fairly cheap. With 3.5" hard disks getting upwards of 750 MB now even one disk could save a lot of photos.

Now if you could just have them online remotely too - like if someone made a hard disk controller integrated with a wireless network card the way they do for portable drives and USB.

Chris :)