[Nix]

Wow, actually buying a tape drive for Volition?  That's actually pretty nice, but everyone over there probably IS too busy to do something like that.  Besides, tapes over time do degrade, and whatever's on them might not be readable.  I had an old set of QIC-80 tapes that sat in my closet for about 10 years, when I went to fire them up, the tapes snapped in half when I tried a retension.  Somehow, the tape just kinda.. melted onto itself to be sticky enough to cause it to pull apart when the retension was run.  So, putting it simply, they'd probably have to send it to a data recovery center to get the data off, and that's gonna cost huge buckaroos.  I was disappointed because the tapes had a lot of old DOS games on there, and a lot of old stuff I was into when I had my first computer.

Just a ballpark figure though on a modern Ultrium tape drive, you're looking at thousands of dollars just for the drive itself.  Remarkably, the media is dirt cheap ($30-50 for a 100-200 gb tape I believe) and the older the tape, the harder it would be to get a drive that reads such a tape, and the higher cost you'll probably pay, unless you go ebay, which very well may destroy exactly what you want to save. 

It's late, I didn't mean for that to rhyme. 

[Blue Haired Maniac]

+1 Ditto to TheSizzler. Course, they were kinda miaking things up as they went along... wonder if they even have a story? Probably not...

What's wrong with making it up as you go? Big companies do it all the time...prime example is Square Enix and the Final Fantasy VII Compilation.

Okay, that's a horrible example, as the Compilation storylines have just ruined the original FFVII story, IMO.

[Dark Hunter]

I didn't say there was anything wrong with it, just that it was likely that they were doing just that.
It's how I write English class essays. Make it up as I go along. Earn consistent A's, too.  8)

[Polpolion]

+1 Ditto to TheSizzler. Course, they were kinda miaking things up as they went along... wonder if they even have a story? Probably not...

What's wrong with making it up as you go? Big companies do it all the time...prime example is Square Enix and the Final Fantasy VII Compilation.

Okay, that's a horrible example, as the Compilation storylines have just ruined the original FFVII story, IMO.

because that's what soap opreas do.

I don't like soap operas.

[Nix]

This debate is going nowhere.  It's proof positive that they have no story for FS3, no materials, no anything.  I still scream the question though: "Why does it HAVE to be FS3".  We can make the story up any way we want!  There doesn't have to be a FS3 to make people happy. 

Somehow, I feel the people who've been round here longer than a year who've been through this over and over again will still know the truth, and the newbies will never be convinced that V just doesn't have anything for FS3.  Face it, people. 

I'll say it again.  We are the future for Freespace.  Make it as good as you want, about whatever you want.

[jr2]

...tapes over time do degrade, and whatever's on them might not be readable.  I had an old set of QIC-80 tapes that sat in my closet for about 10 years, when I went to fire them up, the tapes snapped in half when I tried a retension.  Somehow, the tape just kinda.. melted onto itself to be sticky enough to cause it to pull apart when the retension was run. 

Kinda funny how they're supposed to be for backup, y'know, a fail-safe?  I think that burning CD or DVDs would be better, they are supposed to last 50-100 yrs, if you store them in a good place.  Too bad they weren't around when made their backups...

[Nix]

Well, people still use tape-based backup today, it's just that there's better technology available to do backups on.  Like Ultrium, and such.  The only problem is that they're all very susceptible to heat damage.  You can leave them in the sun in a hot day and have the edges melt against each other.  CD's and DVD's were definetly around at the time, it's that they probably did what any other company did and backed up all data that they could onto a massive 10+ GB tape (mind you, that'd be massive back in the day) Hell, when FS1 came out, I still used my QIC-80 a bunch.  I had four tapes, but I soon upgraded to a machine that had such an enormous hard drive, I couldn't use the QIC-80 anymore.  The QIC-80 does 400mb uncompressed, 800 compressed.  I had an 8 GB hard drive, which is still in service today in the dos machine I use. 

And Ive heard horror stories about modern DVD's lasting no more than 5 years, even if they're burned once, read a few times, put in a dark drawer or box, and later fired up again to find that they won't read worth a darn. That, and some discs in extreme humidity conditions might actually split, if they're dual layer.  I've had one commercial DVD do that to me, and it's hella easy to do it to a DVD-DL.  Just be a dumbass like me and drop it on it's edge.  It was like cracking an egg, split right in two!

[Turey]

That, and some discs in extreme humidity conditions might actually split, if they're dual layer.  I've had one commercial DVD do that to me, and it's hella easy to do it to a DVD-DL.  Just be a dumbass like me and drop it on it's edge.  It was like cracking an egg, split right in two!

just duct tape the halves back together. It won't destroy your drive or anything... 

[Tyrian]

And Ive heard horror stories about modern DVD's lasting no more than 5 years, even if they're burned once, read a few times, put in a dark drawer or box, and later fired up again to find that they won't read worth a darn. That, and some discs in extreme humidity conditions might actually split, if they're dual layer.  I've had one commercial DVD do that to me, and it's hella easy to do it to a DVD-DL.  Just be a dumbass like me and drop it on it's edge.  It was like cracking an egg, split right in two!

I've heard other horror stories about burned CD's and DVD's splitting, warping, or otherwise deforming.  I used to have a magazine article on what causes discs to deteriorate faster than normal, excepting the common causes.  One of the more unusual ones was a case where a CD had warped because it had been written on with a Sharpie marker.  Apparently the ink in those babies is corrosive/acidic and will seep into the disk causing the parts to separate -- even if it is a single layer CD.  Kind of a big problem when a lot of people I know use Sharpies to label their discs.

[Mongoose]

...so why is it that, in the year 2006, all of those techie nerd engineers out there haven't yet been able to come up with a storage system that's fast, reasonably large, reasonably-priced, and can last more than a paltry five years?  Honestly, from the way everyone talks about storage media, it feels like the only safe way to keep my files around is to chisel their code bit-by-bit into stone tablets.

[Turey]

it feels like the only safe way to keep my files around is to chisel their code bit-by-bit into stone tablets.

Erosion FTW!

I've yet to have a normal hard drive fail badly enough that I couldn't get the data off of it by myself.

[Nix]

I have, a conner perhiperals 810mb hard drive.  It sat in the back of my closet for over 5 years without power being applied to it, and once it was powered on, the drive was riddled with bad sectors.

Today, about the only promising thing is to keep everything on hard disk, then move it around whenever you get a bigger hard disk. I've done that with data I've had since I've started home computing back in '94. 

[jr2]

I have, a conner perhiperals 810mb hard drive.  It sat in the back of my closet for over 5 years without power being applied to it, and once it was powered on, the drive was riddled with bad sectors.

Today, about the only promising thing is to keep everything on hard disk, then move it around whenever you get a bigger hard disk. I've done that with data I've had since I've started home computing back in '94. 

Get a large external hard drive, and have two computers with equally large internal hard drives.  Keep all of you stuff in a few folders that you always will remember, (eg, with me, \backup, \Copied CDs, \My Music, \Downloads, \docs <- dump "My Documents" there when using external HDD on the go.
use xcopy /e /h /i /c /k /v to copy 'em, and keep folders w/ dates in subfolders, eg \Downloads\CD burning progs\new 11-20-6 .
That's what I do anyways...
Oh, and use PD5's File Finder to search.  Beats the crap out of Windows' Find File system.
ftp.uni-koeln.de/pc/win32/shell/pd5free.exe
I guess v-com doesn't have it on their site anymore, but they do have the free trial of pd6... haven't tried that though.
If you want to, just extract pdfind.exe out of the archive and use it.

[Nix]

I'm a Ghost 2003 man myself.  Actually liked Drive Image a lot better though.

[IceFire]

...so why is it that, in the year 2006, all of those techie nerd engineers out there haven't yet been able to come up with a storage system that's fast, reasonably large, reasonably-priced, and can last more than a paltry five years?  Honestly, from the way everyone talks about storage media, it feels like the only safe way to keep my files around is to chisel their code bit-by-bit into stone tablets.

Thats why academics have the popularized concepts pertaining to space and time sensitive media.  It seems that whatever is least portable and least practical (i.e. a stone tablet) is best at lasting through time.  Whatever is space portable...like a portable hard drive or a CD...is most prone to damage and not lasting very long.  Murphys law.

[Flipside]

There's also the law of resale. Basically, the original CD making technique made disks you could do all sorts of horrible things to and they'd still work fine, but that meant that once a CD was sold, it was money lost. In the UK, it's sometimes known as the 'Rule of the Lightbulb', since it would be very easy to make lighbulbs that never blew, but that would mean a loss of profit.

[Snail]

CDs, peh. Use floppy disks.

[Nix]

There's also the law of resale. Basically, the original CD making technique made disks you could do all sorts of horrible things to and they'd still work fine, but that meant that once a CD was sold, it was money lost. In the UK, it's sometimes known as the 'Rule of the Lightbulb', since it would be very easy to make lighbulbs that never blew, but that would mean a loss of profit.

That, and making something like that is in itself expensive to mass produce.  More money lost there.  Kinda like the LS-120, the mega floppy disk made by Imation right around when Iomega's Zip disks started getting popular.  They were way more durable than regular 3.5 inch floppies, could work in just about every environment (whereas at the time, Zip only worked in Windows environments, now they work just about everywhere, even DOS) but were hellishly slow and expensive to the end user.  People didn't adopt the standard, and even more money was lost.

Can someone tell me this though, I mean it's ridiculous, and I might just be a dumbass, Why does a DVD-DL disc cost so much more than a single layer DVD?  A Single layer DVD has two substrates, one a clear "dummy" substrate, where the other one is the dye layer.  DL's have two dye substrates, yet are almost twice to in some cases nearly 5 times the cost?

[Shadow0000]

Can someone tell me this though, I mean it's ridiculous, and I might just be a dumbass, Why does a DVD-DL disc cost so much more than a single layer DVD?  A Single layer DVD has two substrates, one a clear "dummy" substrate, where the other one is the dye layer.  DL's have two dye substrates, yet are almost twice to in some cases nearly 5 times the cost?

I have read that the process of manufacturing for both DVD-14 and DVD-18 (17 GB) is really more complex and not comparable with the manufacturing process of a DVD-5, maybe the same is happening to the DVD-9.

[Nix]

That makes sense with a higher capacity DVD, but it doesn't make sense with a DVD-9.  Both layer's capacities are the same,  and the process is just about the same as assembling a DVD-5.  Sure, you've got to line up the layers properly, etc, I dont know the exact process on how a disc is made, but it seems like it'd be way easier to do. 

My conspiracy module says that they might keep the prices prohibitive because it's fairly easy to strip a DVD of it's encryption and burn it to a DL DVD.