2013-04-20 A lot of my CD-Rs started to produce read errors, recently. Most of them are up to ten years old. It's time to copy them. Some months ago, I copied all of my floppies to one CD. Now, I started to copy my CDs to DVDs. (Maybe I should have started with BD right away, but better to get something done now than to think about it even longer.) It's a lot of video data on the disks I've processed today. I mount the CD, copy the contents with ddrescue(1) -- sometimes with small unrecoverable sections --, I merge video that were split over multiple files, and write the new disk. mount /media/cdrom ddrescue /media/cdrom/foo-part1.avi . log # repeat if necessary umount /media/cdrom rm log mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -o foo.avi foo.parts*.avi growisofs -Z /dev/dvdrw -J -R foo.avi ... For those disks that I used a lot, the ten years of their exis- tance was too long. They have too many read errors. I should have copied them already a few years ago. People say, that DVDs last longer than CDs, but anyway, I should copy them by, say, 2020. Hopefully HVDs are available then. I don't like optical media but I like cheap and hopefully robust offline backups, hence I don't work with multiple external hard disks. I wonder if I should buy an external BD writer. They cost about 100,- EUR currently. SL BD-Rs (25GB) cost about 1,- EUR each. That might be worth it ... My backup dream, however, is a WORM device. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke