Zip drive

[ironwood]

I keep losing my kids pictures and home videos. First my laptop crashed and everything was lost. I bought external harddrive but it stopped working. I have to hold it above my head at a certain angle to get connection (no kidding). Then I got memory sticks but I already lost one and computer cannot recognize another. So far the only picture I saved are the actual old paper photos. I was thinking that zip drive might be a more reliable source. Even if drive goes bad I still save zip disks. Can anybody comment?

[tcusta00]

Zip drives are small and becoming obsolete - why not an external hard drive? They're getting cheaper and cheaper and are less prone to the problems you'd have with flash media like memory sticks.

You could also just burn CDs/DVDs but the longer-term storage is questionable on them.

[Jason Nipp]

Zip drives are small and becoming obsolete - why not an external hard drive? They're getting cheaper and cheaper and are less prone to the problems you'd have with flash media like memory sticks.
http://www.dbstalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=10893&d=1194224479

[ironwood]

Zip drives are small and becoming obsolete - why not an external hard drive? They're getting cheaper and cheaper and are less prone to the problems you'd have with flash media like memory sticks.

You could also just burn CDs/DVDs but the longer-term storage is questionable on them.

I have an external hard drive I bought it at Staples and its supposed to be good but it just doesnt work. As I said computer wouldnt recognize it unless I shake it and then turn upside down and hold in left hand at a certain angle. This is not reliable.
CDs can get scratched.
I think some zip disks store 1 gig. Its enough memory but my main issue is reliability. I dont see how they would go bad.

[Stuart Sweet]

I would avoid zip disks like the plague. This is obsolete 20th century technology and is not designed for long-term archiving. I cringe when I see one.

[tcusta00]

I have an external hard drive I bought it at Staples and its supposed to be good but it just doesnt work. As I said computer wouldnt recognize it unless I shake it and then turn upside down and hold in left hand at a certain angle. This is not reliable.
CDs can get scratched.
I think some zip disks store 1 gig. Its enough memory but my main issue is reliability. I dont see how they would go bad.

It sounds as if you just have a bad hard drive - that can happen with anything. I was eluding to getting a new (better) hard drive, sorry, didn't specifically say that.

[Greg Alsobrook]

How much space are you needing? A flash drive or a burned disk is going to be the most reliable form of backup you can have. I use this to backup all of my photos.... http://www.buy.com/prod/sandisk-8gb-cruzer-micro-u3-usb2-0-flash-drive/q/loc/101/205147212.html

Right now it's $60... but keep an eye out... I bought one a couple of weeks ago on their site for $25...

[ironwood]

Thats my problem I dont want to take chances I want something 100% safe. All my files are gone exept the ones I physically printed and put in a photo album.

[Greg Alsobrook]

Thats my problem I dont want to take chances I want something 100% safe. All my files are gone exept the ones I physically printed and put in a photo album.

Nothing is going to be 100% safe... but like i said, flash memory and a burned disc are your two best options... If you're that worried about it, make more than 1 backup and keep them in different locations...

[tcusta00]

Or you could always use a remote online storage service for redundancy. Not sure which ones are good/reliable, but at least web-hosting space is cheap, which is similar. I think I pay around $60/year for my hosting plan and have 10 gb of space.

Nothing is fail-safe though.

[harsh]

I think some zip disks store 1 gig. Its enough memory but my main issue is reliability. I dont see how they would go bad.Iomega's original Zip discs store about 95MB (give or take due to file system overhead. The are just like open air hard disks and if you can't keep a sealed hard drive working, you'll never survive a Zip. Their new discs are wicked expensive and similarly prone to failure.

Iomega's 1GB disk is the Jaz. They had a rather high failure rate as again, they are essentially an open air hard drive.

I'd be looking at using CD or DVD for permanent storage on the cheap. Other possibilities are the picture vault devices or a Network Attached Storage drive that is locked up in a closet where curious fingers don't have access.

Hard drives are susceptible to two forms of abuse:

1. Overheating
2. Drop testing (intentional or otherwise)

If you can prevent those two issues, they usually last for years.

[MIAMI1683]

How much space are you needing? A flash drive or a burned disk is going to be the most reliable form of backup you can have. I use this to backup all of my photos.... http://www.buy.com/prod/sandisk-8gb-cruzer-micro-u3-usb2-0-flash-drive/q/loc/101/205147212.html

Right now it's $60... but keep an eye out... I bought one a couple of weeks ago on their site for $25...

I use that also.

[ironwood]

Yeah probably several different sources of backup is the best option. I just wanted to ask about zip drives I never had one.

[Greg Alsobrook]

I'm with Stuart and tcusta... zip drives are very outdated...

[TBoneit]

I use A Lite-On DVD Burner and Verbatim discs. Many of the blank discs being sold aren't real good.

First off if the pictures are so precious why are you not keeping the cameras memory cards intact instead of re-using them. They are getting cheaper and cheaper to buy. I just did a data recovery last week on a SD memory card where the owner deleted 900+ pictures by mistake. I got them all back as far as I could tell because she hadn't kept on using the card for new pictures. Not the first time I've done that for customers either. Tales of woe I hear all the time about the computer died and took all the pictures with it. Bar Mitzvahs, First Communions, Birthdays, Weddings, Graduations, Vacations, etc. Poof, Gone.

BTW your experiences are a perfect example of why I like film vs digital cameras. Film, go to the fireproof small safe, pull the negatives and reprint to you hearts content. Film has withstood the test of time. going back to Civil War times they can still be printed as long as someone has handled them carefully and not broken the glass the negative used back then before film.

[TBoneit]

BTW an external hard drive as one of several methods is fine as long as you don't leave it powered on all the time wearing it out prematurely. I always pull the power on mine when I'm not using them. Western Digital have been better for me than Maxtor or Seagate.

[spartanstew]

BTW your experiences are a perfect example of why I like film vs digital cameras. Film, go to the fireproof small safe, pull the negatives and reprint to you hearts content. Film has withstood the test of time. going back to Civil War times they can still be printed as long as someone has handled them carefully and not broken the glass the negative used back then before film.

Can't you also put the memory cards in a fireproof small safe? Pull them out and reprint to your hearts content? Won't you still be able to reprint them a couple of hundred years from now (if they're handled carefully)?

Not sure I see the advantage of film in that regard.

[Sharkie_Fan]

I have a DLink DNS-323 network storage device. It has 2 drives and runs a flavor of Linux. I found a site that had a tutorial to write a script for Linux that would copy the contents of drive 1 over to drive 2 every so often. (There is software raid support on the device, but sometimes it gets confused and loses the raid configuration and it's a PITA to get the files back).

I "populate" drive 1 with a copy of my photo storage on my local machine.

I also archive every so often onto DVDs and those go into the firesafe!

I just got this setup. Before I was using a Netgear raid solution and it lost it's raid configuration and I've yet to recover that data! Fortunately because I archive to DVD, I only lost the photos from 1 wedding that we attended that I hadn't burned to a DVD yet! There were a few on there of my boys that I will miss, but other than that, I had most everything.

If you want 100% safety (or as near to it as possible), redundancy is your friend... The "bonus" to my system is that the DNS-323 is currently running Twonky and I can view my photos on the HR2x's in the house. My wife can also get to all of them on her laptop.

[Cholly]

Add me to the list of people who have had Zip drives and gotten rid of them. The really are not all that great. Flash memory or an external hard drive would be the best bet.

[cwbuckley]

I have a 250 zip drive and I use it from time to time. In the time that I have used it, it has worked pretty good. However I have had disks go bad. They are not that much different then a floppy drive. Just more space.

[ironwood]

Yeah film is the best. I have a video camera that uses mini-dv tapes. I never liked it because I cant transfer them on my computer but the fact is they are all intact and will stay unless there is a fire. Now I use digital cam and worry about those files. Online storage seems pretty safe, YouTube has unlimited and free video storage.

[Steve Mehs]

Back in '98 I was pretty bummed that my computer didn't come with a Zip drive, but in hindsight, while it was a good idea, Iomega had terrible execution of Zip and Jaz. Drives didn't really come standard, the media was expensive and unreliable at times, slow read/write times. With CDs at 700MB, DVDs at 4.7GB or 9.4GB and BDs at 25GB, optical storage is the way to go. And flash drives are a Godsend. There is nothing on my computer or any memory card that I would be lost without , but if there was I'd have a back up on DVD or BD, a copy of that in a safety deposit box and a back up at a place online like Carbonite. I'm pretty hard on memory cards and flash drives and have yet to have any die on me. In fact I find tons of these at work. I work in an industrial laundry and you wouldn't believe how many people leave flash drives and memory cards in their pockets, in fact just last week I found a 2GB San Disk SD card that I reformatted and am using for my PDA, and this thing actually went through the wash, with industrial strength detergents, alkaline, degreasers and other chemicals we use and still came out fine, the iPod I found a few months ago however did not.