stupidity and disaster..

[Guest]

The drives are sealed anyway - if there was no power on as they got wet, even the electric parts of the HDD should be OK after a long time of drying. You may even open the cases and put the HDD in a new healthy case. Worth a try. Good luck.

[popdrome]

When it comes to resharing, I might be useful...

Yes - think so too! Good heavens man were would FLM be without you. Kein Witz.

[popdrome]

The drives are sealed anyway - if there was no power on as they got wet, even the electric parts of the HDD should be OK after a long time of drying. You may even open the cases and put the HDD in a new healthy case. Worth a try. Good luck.

Yes I'll give it a try. I'm just not counting on it now. Thanks. mr. willow!

[FLL]

You should check the s!Xvid tag, it's pretty much on all "my releases"

I've never clearly inferred the distinction between s!Xvid.aliv and just s!Xvid, I thought maybe aliv meant your rip and the others were your releases but someone else's rip. s!Xfix is I assume s!Xvid where you did some additional processing to the audio or video. Or is there more (or less) involved?

[popdrome]

You should check the s!Xvid tag, it's pretty much on all "my releases"

I've never clearly inferred the distinction between s!Xvid.aliv and just s!Xvid, I thought maybe aliv meant your rip and the others were your releases but someone else's rip. s!Xfix is I assume s!Xvid where you did some additional processing to the audio or video. Or is there more (or less) involved?

Yeah I'm sorry for the confusion, FLL.

It's a personal thingy. Before all this grew out of proportion, I used the .aliv tag for vids "really interesting" films (AL=ALIPTES IV=Interesting Video, hence ALIV), that I kept in another folder apart from all the other s!xvid's. What's interesting, is quite subjective of course and only based on personal taste.

s!Xvid is a video I encoded myself.
s!Xfix is a video I just edited, you got that right.

Cheers!

[plonkah]

Word of warning about relying on DVD backups. Unless you are investing in good quality DVDs (check this link for some quality pointers http://digg.com/tech_news/DVD_-R,_R_Rec ... lity_Chart you may find, as I did, that I was able to recover only about 5-10% of what I had burned. I stupidly used el cheapo disks, and paid a heavy price, so just a friendly heads up that you do not repeat this !!

[FLL]

Word of warning about relying on DVD backups. Unless you are investing in good quality DVDs (check this link for some quality pointers http://digg.com/tech_news/DVD_-R,_R_Rec ... lity_Chart you may find, as I did, that I was able to recover only about 5-10% of what I had burned. I stupidly used el cheapo disks, and paid a heavy price, so just a friendly heads up that you do not repeat this !!

Thanks plonkah for the reminder. Two very good media lists it points to are http://www.cdr-zone.com/articles/record ... age_1.html and http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

One thing I always do is include the verify step, which doubles the burn time or even more but catches a number of problems. I also save the ed2k link of what I archive so I can later double-check that what I read back from the disk is not corrupted (if I didn't get it from ed2k originally I generate the link by sharing it with an emule which is disconnected and thus not really sharing it).

DVDR media is tricky, because many brands (even those listed as very good by those lists) vary greatly from batch to batch, and some are manufactured by different sources even though they have the same brand. A lot depends on your burner, too.

Long ago I decided DVDR backup was good even if tedious, because it greatly lessened the chances of losing everything in one shot. While that could happen if a physical DVDR spindle gets stolen or damaged or there's a fire, it's much less likely than losing a hard drive, which tend to have more limited lives and depend on electronics. I can live with the idea that a small percentage of the DVDRs I have burned may turn out to be bad, but the idea of losing a whole drive at once is much much more painful.

[plonkah]

Another piece of timely advice. I have lost three "cheap" USB drives through using them for active EMule downloading, my advice is use these drives ONLY to store the media, not to download to (howver tempting it seems to have 1TB available to download the huge number of EMule files). The other issue is that they are NOT good at working with the OS to cache data, and many a time I have found that a download was corrupted (the dreaded error 50). USUALLY, the data can be retrieved by removing the drive from the case, and attaching it either as SATA or IDE then just copying the data.
The other piece of advice is that it is usually the cases (can't remember proper terminology at this stage of the USB drives are what causes the issues not the drives within (usually SATA drives). It is generally agreed that it is a more relaible option to but a decent drive (the Green drives are very highly rated), and a separate case (goddammit what is the proper term ??) - this works out slightly more expensive but seems to be a better option.
Of course there are other options - if you have spare SATA/IDE slots AND controllers, the best option is to put another drive internally, OR if you have slot for another CONTROLLER, install one of these and add drives to the new controller. Mine is maxed hence I have no option but external drives.
Hope this is useful.

[loverboy]

Hope this is useful.

It certainly is........my experience of external drives is similar. It appears to be the board within the enclosure that fails, quite often frying the drive in the process. The drives themselves are not usually suspect............after all they're the same as within your PC case. The manufacturers advertise external drives as being portable but I would excercise caution.......avoid moving/shocks & certainly always wait for the drive to stop spinning & preferably cool down before moving. I tend to treat external drives as short-term storage solutions these days, preferring a combination of more physical drives within the PC case & DVD backup.
No backup method is 100% satisfactory but any is better than none............I wonder how many here have still not got around to it!

lb

[katzenjammer]

Backup of everything after failure last summer. Looking forward to SSD drives becoming bigger and cheaper Keep one TB-drive in the bookshelf with all the nordic releases, music, movies and documentaries and one with FLM-related stuff. And seldom attached to pc, unless i move something onto them for backup.