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Just a heads up. I had old backups onto 2gb Jaz Disks, 10 in all, that had been last checked about 4 years ago. On checking them yesterday I found that 4 were unreadable. Now I know I could maybe ressurect them somehow but I have further backups on cd of the same material so I don't need to. This is just a reminder to those of you with older backups that this stuff ages faster than we do!

Thanks for the warning. I guess it might be time to try and copy some old disk data onto a newer storage device. I have old Jaz disks, floppies, and another format which I can't remember.

My uncle told me recently that he went to restore some data which he burned onto CDs about 10 years ago, and several of them were irretrievable, as the surface coating of the CDs was flaking off. He lost some video footage of his daughter when she was a baby.

Makes me nervous to think of what I have backed up on old disks that may no longer be readable.

I would check your CD backups as well. They don't last forever either.

I would recommend for critical data to do a copy every five years or so.

Also Never use cheap disks Use the best disks you can find and store them away from light in a cool place in folders.

I recently went through some old disks from about 02 and everyone was fine.

Welcome to world of the Iomega Click Of Death (COD). A well documented problem with Zip and Jaz drives.

IOMEGA Jaz and Zip = Very Unreliable, Not for Back-up.

Actually not good for very much at all.

amergin wrote:Just a heads up. I had old backups onto 2gb Jaz Disks, 10 in all, that had been last checked about 4 years ago. On checking them yesterday I found that 4 were unreadable. Now I know I could maybe ressurect them somehow but I have further backups on cd of the same material so I don't need to. This is just a reminder to those of you with older backups that this stuff ages faster than we do!

Try them on a different machine, that is, one without Leopard. I've found that most, if not all, of the DVD backups I made a few years back do not work on my Mac Pro with Leopard. They still work fine in any other machine with an older OS.

I don't know if it will be the same situation with a Jaz disk, but it's universal for my DVDs. Many commercial DVDs also don't work.

Shooshie

Aren't jazz disk drives SCSI? Could it be that your SCSI adaptor is unreliable and not passing certain data?

par for the course with Iomega drives. If they never had a good track record with data integrity. After buying my first ZIP drive I learned this the hard way...and then bought a Magneto-Optical for long term backups.

Now, with DVDs and HDs so cheap I just make several backups using those.

And for the record 40% failure is better than average for Iomega media (not sure if that makes you feel better or worse).

4 out of 10 failures was not bad when they were new and I was using them regularly. I don't think any of my Jaz disks worked when I stopped using them.

There is nothing we can do to store digital information reliably that I know of. We are in the new dark ages.

bb

bongo_x wrote:There is nothing we can do to store digital information reliably that I know of. We are in the new dark ages.

You guys are freaking me out with all this. (Notice sdemott's avatar, just above, to see the look on my face.)

I would be devasted to lose a multitude of creative projects I have worked on over the past couple of decades. I suppose I need to do more backups and monitoring of the data.

But you are right bongo_x... someone needs to devise a more reliable method of digital data storage that will survive generations. The risks of losing priceless data due to discs failures (or mere flaking/wearing of the medium) is very disturbing.

Used to use those darn things for backup on TV dialogue editing, they were the most horridly unreliable things anyone had ever seen. I've got half a dozen of those drives in a box over in the corner of one of the closets - you're welcome to them!