Spectre: Are there any better backup options than blurays or HDDs. Tape drives look like they're aimed at business but at least they won't break as easily as HDDs if they get a knock.

dtgreene: Well, there is the option of using SSDs for backup. I don't know how viable it is to use it, but I note that cheaper SSDs are likely to work fine for this purpose; you don't need a fast drive with a large amount of write cycles. (Remember: Even a cheap SSD likely has more write cycles than a rewriteable optical disk, which in turn has far more than a write-once optical disk.)

dtgreene: RAID does not protect against disasters like "rm #-rf /" (without the # sign that I added for safety) or malicious code deleting important files; the RAID controller/software will happily propogate the deletion to the other drives in the array.

vsr: Why you store them yourself? Discs are not ok for the job of course. But for photos, documents they are better than hdds, in my opinion. I've written above why.

If you're so paranoid about it, you can download your collection file by file, compute theirs MD5/SHA{1,256,512} and delete them afterwards. In dire times you can download all the files from torrents (or any other source you'll manage to find) and make sure they are legit.

Spectre: Are there any better backup options than blurays or HDDs. Tape drives look like they're aimed at business but at least they won't break as easily as HDDs if they get a knock.

JDelekto: Just out of curiosity, I noticed that people had mentioned "cloud backups". I remember reading something about some of the hard drive companies considering to offer secure cloud-backup storage, paid monthly like a utility in order to keep a backup of your drives (even as they change) offsite in the cloud.

Now, I was a little skeptical at first, but for a few years now I've been using DropBox for several years now, and to be honest, it's been pretty solid. Often I've used it to get to documents, videos, e-books, installation software, etc. not only from my phone, tablet and PCs, but I've used it when travelling on family's computers which had nothing more than a Web browser. Many years before that, I had to burn my data on CD and eventually thumb drives if I wanted to take it with me.

Now, while a different beast altogether than hard-drive backup, I think if they offered several terabytes of space for a reasonable monthly fee, provided extremely good encryption for data protection, a Web-based file-system to access and download data on demand, as well as some type of background restoration if you need to get a new drive, I would probably go for it.

Recovering from data loss (if you can recover things that weren't 'work product'), is typically many days of effort. Even more if your applications are digital downloads rather than physical media.

nightcraw1er.488: Sorry, trust issue there. I don't trust any online anything. Also, much like renting anything, at the end you don't own any of it, so its money down the drain in my view. At least I can use the hdds for other purposes at the end.

Spectre: Are there any better backup options than blurays or HDDs. Tape drives look like they're aimed at business but at least they won't break as easily as HDDs if they get a knock.

vsr: Nothing. Even Google relies on tape media.

However, from time to time messages uppear about revolutionary solutions, like this "memory crystals".

Lin545: Nice timing.
Just lost all the Firefox tabs.

phaolo: What? Just use Session Manager and backup your FF folder in Appdata.

Lin545: Plugin fixes a bug*. Yeah. =)

* Lin x64, NX on, Xeon, ECC RAM, no SMART problems.

phaolo: Eh?
Btw, that plugin automatically creates various backups of your sessions.
Long are the days when I had to manually fix the file O_o'