DVD's Bad for Archiving

Homemade DVD’s: Going, Going, Gone?

Following up my on recent post about disapperaing data on hard drives, comes a warning about the short lifespans of recordable DVD's. David Pogue, the technology writer for the New York Times, mentions some DVD's he made that after 2 years were already unreadable on many computers. I was taken aback by 2 years. I knew recordable DVD's didn't have a really long lifespan, but I was hoping for something more like 10 years.

The short takeaway is that recordable DVD's are not an archiving format. They are a distribution format.

Refreshing Hard Drive Storage

Larry Jordan has recently been warning against the dangers of leaving drives on a shelf for periods over a year. He says that after a year, the data will start to essentially disappear. There's a way to avoid this effect of the vanishing data, and that's to have the computer read the entire disc.

Larry just posted an article on how to do this preventive action on his recent newsletter (not sure if this link will work for long, as these newsletters are only available for a limited time.) Here's the basics of the preventitive action.
-Make sure your user account has administrator access
-Open the Terminal applications, which is in the Utilities directory
-Enter this command: sudo cat /dev/rdisk0> /dev/null
Actually that command will read your entire boot drive, which is probably not the drive that has been sitting on a shelf for a year. You can run this task on different drives, but first you have to figure out the identifier for the drive (hint: it's not the name that you called the drive.)

To get the disk identifier, go to Disk Utility, also in the Utilities folder. Select the drive, not the volume--the drive's name usually starts with the capacity of the disk followed by the drive's manufacturer, e.g., Seagate, Hitachi, LaCie--the volume is what you named the drive or a partition on the drive. After selecting the disk that you want to run the maintenance on, click on the info icon at the top of the application window. This opens a new window with info on your drive, the disk identifer is the word "disk" followed by a number. If the disk identifier was disk2, then your command would be: sudo cat /dev/rdisk2> /dev/null

The command will take a while to run--we're probably talking hours. You can interrupt this procedure by hitting Control + C while in the Terminal.

Disappearing data is only one risk you run by using a hard drive as long-term storage. But this seems like something worth doing if you care about the data that you have left on a drive.

Blu-ray Burning with Toast 9

"Taming the Wild Blu, yonder... " By Bruce Nazarian

"Taming the Wild Blu, part 2..." By Bruce Nazarian

Two good articles that cover the Blu-ray burning featues of Toast 9 on Macs. The first article covers the basics of burning Blu-ray and has a good tutorial on burning a Blu-ray data disc. We are currently using Toast 8 to burn Blu-ray discs to archive movies and old FCP projects as data. For some reason, I can't get Toast 9 to recognize our burner, but Toast 8 works fine for this--this tutorial will still help if you are trying to figure out how to burn a BD with Toast 8. There's a new version of Toast 9 out, 9.0.4, which I need to try out--hopefully the problems with the BD drive will go away. Recently, I blogged about a video tutorial that covers similar ground as this article.

The second article gets you into creating a Blu-ray discs with high-def video. So you've got your snazzy HD camcorder, but how are you going to playback your next high-def project? Apple isn't really helping you out--you can't playback video from Blu-ray discs on your Mac (much less author a Blu-ray disc with their software.) But this article points out the other options, namely Blu-ray players, which already cost less than $200.

Toast 9 does basic authoring of Blu-ray video discs. Simple menus, encoding of video to MPEG-2 or H.264, and, of course, burning your Blu-ray disc (or even regular DVD if you have about 20 minutes of video or less.)

Don't forget about Adobe's Encore CS3, and now CS4, which I blogged about earlier this year. Encore has a much more sophisticated tools for authoring Blu-ray discs than Toast's. But for simple discs, Toast looks like an easy way to put your high-def video onto disc.

Blu-ray Burning 101

Not sure if everyone really knows about the Blu-ray burner that we have. We bought the OWC Mercury Pro 2x Blu-ray Panasonic SW-5582. It's an external burner that burns 25GB and 50GB over firewire. Right now it's hooked up to the G4 that interns have been working with.

We got it to back up data mostly. Blu-ray is more reliable than a hard-drive and 25GB is decent capacity for backing up video files. We are hoping to use it to free up some of our hard drives that are sitting around not getting used because of old projects that no one wants to delete.

The discs aren't cheap, around $10, but it's reasonable, especialy when you consider that it's a robust, easy-to-use archiving solution.

So how do you use it? I'm not going to into all of the setup here (if you are interested ask me), but there's a video that covers burning discs in the Mac's Finder and with Toast. This video shows Toast 9, but we use Toast 8, and it works pretty much the same (I think the main difference is that they tweaked the interface.)

MacVideo: Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

I looked for that drive mentioned in the video and couldn't find it. This guy is British, and I couldn't find anything as comparably cheap or anything with the same model number in the States. Remember folks, the dollar is a currency on the wane, eventually our greenbacks aren't going to go as far when buying all those imported, electronics.

Now, you can't watch any blu-ray movies on Macs. Apple needs to add support for that both in hardware and the operating system, and as I've written before Apple has made no announcement indicating that they will support Blu-ray movie playback at all. However, you can author Blu-ray movies using Adobe's Encore software on an Intel Mac. Right now we have that up and running on the new Octo-core Intel Mac Pro that Hiawatha uses. But until Link gets a Blu-ray player or a Playstation 3, then we don't have any way to playback those Blu-ray movies. (I'm all for getting a PS3--how about some Rock Band jamming at the office?)

Here's an article from Adobe discussing workflow for encoding high-def video using Compressor to burn onto Blu-ray using Encore:
Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray