OT: In defense of a GUI (was: atapicam, blah, blah)

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 10:40:31AM -1000, Robert Marella wrote:
> > dirsplit (http://freshmeat.net/projects/dirsplit/) will do the trick
> > nicely.
> > 
> > Roland
> 
> Roland
> 
> Thanks for the reply. Mea culpa, I failed to mention that the
> individual file cannot be spread over different media. After archiving
> to DVD I than catalog the photos on a Windows machine using Portfolio.

Dirsplit doesn't split up files. And you can even tell it to keep
directories intact.

> My photographer will get calls years later from brides wanting a
> certain picture or two. Using Portfolio she can call up the picture and
> it will request the specific DVD be installed. 

CD-R and DVD±R might not be the most reliable form of long term
backup, though. I've seen test reports in magazines indicating significant
corruption after as little as two years. There are special "archival
quality" disks, but they are more expensive. See
e.g. http://www.manifest-tech.com/media_dvd/dvd_compatibility.htm and
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm and
http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media/

I like USB harddisks for backups, because of the large and ever growing
capacity available, although the cost per gigabyte is currently around
1.75 that of a cheap DVD disk. But problems like splitting up large
directories disappear, as does hunting through stacks of DVDs. 

Other people here are more knowledgeable about things like tape backup,
which still seems to be a popular solution for people with large
collections of data. 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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