But unbelievably, they put the disc 1 layer change in the stupidest spot ever. Rather than put it between episodes, or even at a quiet spot within an episode, they put it in the middle of a song (Dexys Midnight Runners singing “Jackie Wilson Said”).

Idiots!

Haven’t checked yet where the disc 2 layer change is. The disc 2 layer change is at the start of a song in Time.

Previous rant about DVD layer changes.

Q. I want to archive family photos and slides from our hard drive onto a DVD. However, I have read that home-burnt DVDs and CDs can have a short shelf life of about five years. What is the best technology to store 1-5 GB of irreplaceable images?
B. McGregor

A Manufacturers claim life spans of 30 to 100 years for DVD-R and DVD+R discs and up to 30 years for DVD-RW, DVD+RW. Your advice about a five-year life may apply to a CD that has not been burnt, as in that state the storage life is much shorter. For archiving you should use a premium-quality product, which in my opinion is Verbatim as they come out on top in almost all independent reviews that I have read.

No no no no no. You don’t tell someone who wants to store irreplaceable images that it’s fine to chuck it on a DVD, and blindly believe the manufacturer’s claim of the 30 years plus lifespan. The technology is not yet nearly that old, so while theoretical lab tests might claim that, in my book it’s not conclusively proven, and plenty of people have had problems.

If the files involved are genuinely irreplaceable, the message here is to make sure you don’t rely on one copy, or even on one medium. You make multiple copies, in a format that is futureproof (JPEG probably being the best for photos), distribute them widely (for instance with different family members) and check and copy them regularly onto new media.

You sure as hell don’t burn a single copy and chuck the DVD in the cupboard and hope nothing renders it unreadable.

• Computerworld: Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs
• Previous post about long term archiving
• Previous rants about George

So I got my Linksys NSLU2 home. I thought I’d fire it up and make sure it worked. There’d be nothing more frustrating than flashing it with the Linux OS, find it doesn’t work and then wonder whether the issue is with the new Firmware or the actual hardware.

Plugged it in, fired it up, plugged in and formatted a blank external drive I dug out of the cupboard. All good so far! I can’t plug in a disk with anything on it because the LinkSys requires disks to be formatted with EXT3.

Hmmm… what’s this… a firmware upgrade to the NSLU2 that allows it to read NTFS! That’d make the device usable until I get my head around the Linux options!

Loaded up the upgrade, all went smoothly. Plugged in my external hard drive to see if it works. Get “Drive not formatted” message in the NSLU2 admin screen, so it must not support NTFS after all. Oh well. Plugged the external drive back into my desktop PC.

“This disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? Yes/No”

My

heart

stopped.

An entire disk’s worth of data… gone. Video from when the kids were little, lots of photos… gone. I know what you’re all thinking… why wasn’t this data backed up? I have two responses to this. 1) It’s not that easy to back up a 14GB video file. 2) Part of the reason I was setting up this solution is to make automated backups more accessible!

Some have said that I shouldn’t have trusted the device with my data, but in my defence, it’s a shrink wrapped consumer device that’s designed to have drives plugged in to it. If I can’t trust this device with my data, I don’t have much use for it!

I kicked off a File Recovery scan and went to bed very sad.

In the morning, the file recovery had found a bunch of deleted files, but none of the files that were not deleted at the time of the corruption! I tried loading the drive up in a couple of EXT3 file viewers, but they couldn’t read the drive either.

I’d pretty much given up hope of getting my data back.

Then my neighbour nonchalantly suggests I try a partition table repair tool. I load one up and run it. It tells me “The partition table on the disk is incorrect. Would you like to fix it?” I click “Yes”. Bang. All my data is back!!!

Yay! Waves of relief! Not to mention proof that the Linksys had screwed up the disk. The partition table was written for an EXT3 disk, even though it was still formatted in NTFS.

Yesterday I took the Linksys back to Harris Technology and threw it at them as hard as I could. Actually I didn’t and they were incredibly helpful, giving me a full refund without any hassle.

So back to the drawing board. Now that I realise how precious that data is to me, I’m going to have to get a proper, RAID based network drive solution. More money I’ll probably go for a Thecus N2100.

Lesson the First
Imagine losing all your data that is not backed up. How do you feel about that?

Lesson the Second
No, really. Losing it. Right now. Seriously, how do you feel about that?

Weigh your reaction to the above questions against the cost of getting dedicated backup.

Here endeth the lesson.

Update: I was talking to Josh last night and he said it wasn’t clear that I hadn’t installed the funky open source firmware on the LinkSys box yet. It was running the latest official firmware release. I probably also didn’t emphasize enough that I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying one of these pieces of junk

Now I want to make some modifications. The issue is that there are a number of different firmware options to choose from.

My requirements:
- Serve files for media (Basic functionality for all firmware)
- Read from FAT32 formatted external drives (isn’t provided by the base firmware!! The device requires all disks to be formatted!)
- Bittorent client
- Subversion server

Based on this comparison of different firmware options I’m going to have to look at a full linux based OS. Unfortunately I’ve never used Linux, so trying to get it to work on a small memory/slow processor device is going to be a steep learning curve.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.

Requirements:

• Watch DVDs
• Watch other media from my computer
• Reasonably inexpensive

My current solutions contains the following components:

• Xbox running XBMC as a games/media streaming console (just purchased from Global Consoles)
• Some sort of network storage so I don’t need to have my PC running constantly.

The network storage decision is narrowing down. I considered solutions such as the Thecus N1200. I dismissed this as being overpriced and probably overkill for my needs.

My current front runner is a Linksys NSLU2. It doesn’t have any internal disks, but has two USB ports to plug in external drives. The real beauty of the device (affectionately known as the ‘slug’ by fanboyz) is that there is an open source Linux based operating system that can be installed to it. This adds lots of extra functionality like all sorts of servers (print, bittorrent, iTunes, media/photos). I was even thinking I could install svn on it and it can be my source control repository.

I’ll let you know how my plans proceed. Any advice/comments would be very welcome!