Thoughts on IOMEGA REV as location backup solution

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

Hi folks,

I just came across the IOMEGA REV drive and I'm wondering about its suitability as a location backup solution. The drive itself is around £350 (approx $700) and can store 70GB on a removable disk - just right for the REDRAM! It's USB2 and it has a quoted transfer speed of up to 30MB/s. The disks are projected to have a 30 year shelf life and cost around £45 (approx $90) each. All in all, it's comparable with other tape solutions - but will it be rugged enough? Thoughts anyone?

Ziggx

[TimothyD]

Grass Valley are using this, in combination with compact flash on their Infinity camera. So I'm sure it is a decent solution.

Tim

[Jeff Kilgroe]

REVs are pretty rugged. They're a magnetic hard disk platter inside a plastic shell. Much more robust than a hard drive as all the moving parts (heads, motor) are located in the drive unit.

The problem with REV discs are the high cost per GB and the relatively small capacity compared to actual hard drives or tape media. If CF cards and other common forms of FLASH hit 32GB within the next several months, REV disks will be pretty much obsolete.

[dalemccready]

heh, I imagine Iomega are getting a bit sick of that process...

develop drive, get drive to market, buzz ensues, cheaper/larger/more robust alternative turns up, Iomega back to drawing board. Rinse, repeat.

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

The Grass Valley drive looks like it is much more robust than the standard IOMEGA offering. It's a great shame it only holds 35MB though. If they could utilize the 70MB disks then I think it would be a very good solution for on-site backups of the REDRAM. As a matter of interest, does anyone know if you could simply tar or bzip the data from the REDRAM and compress it further? What I want is a robust archiving medium that roughly equates to one REDRAM.

Best Wishes
Ziggx

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You could lump data off the RED RAM or RED Drive or whatever into a zip file... I don't know if any further compression will really be possible though.

[Rob Lohman]

I don't know if any further compression will really be possible though.

Not with something like zip

[Graeme Nattress]

You'll get no further compression as the files are already pretty much close to their full information content.

Graeme

[Joe Carney]

Hopfully in the near future, Blu-Ray data disks at 100gig apiece will be available and affordable.

[Michael Hastings]

Hopfully in the near future, Blu-Ray data disks at 100gig apiece will be available and affordable.

How reliable will they be over the long haul - they told us CD-roms were forever and then we found out they degraded rather quickly.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

BluRay and HD-DVD both use the same substrates dyes being used in DVD media. They're really the exact same thing, but the substrate surface is manufactured to have a smoother surface and a more refined response to the laser pulse - needs smaller photo-emulsive dots with less bleed and from a smaller wavelength laser. Much of the high price on BD media is artificially induced as the manufacture process isn't really any different. Toshiba has even said that for HD-DVD recordable media, if it weren't for the ID printed at the factory, current high-grade DVD-R media could be used as a full capacity HD disc. Hmmm.... I see a future of hacked drive and player firmware so movie pirates can dupe HD-DVDs off onto cheap DVD-R media. ...But that may not happen because it wouldn't be entirely reliable or convenient. I know Toshiba wants to push cheap recordable HD-DVD media a lot more than Sony wants to sell cheap BD media.

That said, current CD and DVD media is a lot better than it used to be... But to expect more than 20~25 years of reliable shelf life out of it would be pushing it. OTOH, nothing else lasts that long either. Tapes degrade, film degrades, etc.. Analog media such as film is obviously a lot more forgiving over time. With digital, any slight degradation anywhere will cause corrupt or missing bits of data. With film, it just becomes slightly aged and often can go unnoticed.

[Stephen Williams]

That said, current CD and DVD media is a lot better than it used to be... But to expect more than 20~25 years of reliable shelf life out of it would be pushing it. OTOH, nothing else lasts that long either. Tapes degrade, film degrades, etc..

Hi,

FWIW B&W color separations have an expected life of over 500 years, Color film less but way longer than 25 years.

Stephen

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hi,

FWIW B&W color separations have an expected life of over 500 years, Color film less but way longer than 25 years.

Stephen

Like anything else, those are just guesses. ;) And the photochemical dyes used in optical media aren't any different than the chemicals used on a piece of film. In fact, it could be argued that optical media potochems are less sensitive and more robust. Analog media is far more forgiving though. Where analog film prevails is that as it deteriorates, it takes a long time for that deterioration to become visible without sensitive testing equipment. And without being able to travel back in time, how would one know how much it has actually changed, without comparing to an unchanged original? But as film can change over time (and it does, even under ideal conditions), it will be visibly unnoticeable if the film is properly stored. With a digital media like an optical disc, the same thing happens... But if one bit changes just enough to affect the laser read-out, it's not a simple shift or change like on a piece of analog film. That bit is suddenly erroneous.

Another way to say it is... If you were to encode binary data to a piece of film as black and white dots of equal density to that of an optical disc, I doubt it would be any more reliable over time than a disc. Reliablilty could be greatly increased by using larger dots, obviously... For both film or optical disc.

And how's that for a rather pointless piece of discussion?

[Stephen Williams]

[QUOTE=AppliedVisual;46281]Like anything else, those are just guesses. ;)

Hi,

Hardly, we have color films today that are way over 25 years old & Black + White films of 100+ years.

Stephen

[M Most]

Like anything else, those are just guesses. ;)

No, they aren't. There is an entire science devoted to accelerated testing, in which materials are subjected to very high temperatures and controlled environments that are scientifically designed to represent years of "normal" atmospheric aging. Film is not the only material that's been used for this kind of testing, and it is thought to be quite accurate. Those numbers are not pulled out of thin air, and they are not a figment of Kodak's imagination.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

No, they aren't. There is an entire science devoted to accelerated testing, in which materials are subjected to very high temperatures and controlled environments that are scientifically designed to represent years of "normal" atmospheric aging. Film is not the only material that's been used for this kind of testing, and it is thought to be quite accurate. Those numbers are not pulled out of thin air, and they are not a figment of Kodak's imagination.

OK, then... educated guesses. I love that you used Kodak as an example, because Kodak was one of the primary developers of CD-R tech and they claimed 100 year shelf life on CD-R for years. For over a decade, actually. But then about 12 years or so into the lifespan of CD-R, someone realized their discs were going bad and so did thousands of others. Manufacturers still claim 25+ years on CD and DVD media. Yes, they use accelerated testing methods on disc media just as they do on film stock or anything else. The fact of the matter is, so far optical media has fallen short of lifespan expectations. And whether anyone wants to admit it or not, so has film stock. You can jump up and down and scream at me that film stock will last 200 years or more, as determined by accelerated tests in a lab. Well, film stocks in the '70s were supposed to be good for over 50 years and here it is only 30 years later and many properly stored prints of popular films have degraded noticeably.

I'm a firm believer that a simulated lab environment and the real world are two entirely different things. The big reason is the one factor that can not, under any circumstances, be simulated in a lab -- the passage of time. You can fool with temperatures and bombard items with excess oxygen or higher air pressures while rapidly varying humidity levels all you want. But there is no true way to subject an object to 5% humidity at 10C degrees at a pressure of 70cmHg for 25 years without actually doing it. All you can build is an estimate, an approximation or just a guess with a scientific foundation. And so far, the history of most anything man-made, be it film, discs, electronic components or even bridges, agrees with me far more than it does not.

I'm not trying to say in any way that film stock is crap or that digital storage media is superior. On the contrary, film prints do win the longevity war at this time. Perhaps in the future this will change... I'm just saying that no one knows for sure that current film stocks will really last as long as claimed. And lab testing doesn't prove anything. It just provides the manufacturer with data to base a claim. A claim that no one, will actually back up with any sort of tangible reassurance, btw... It's not like Kodak is going to pay exorbitant amounts of money to a customer if their film fades away sitting on a shelf for 35 years. At best, they'll buy them a couple new cans of film stock or whatever the currently equivalent media is and pat them on the back with a "sorry, dude".

[Stephen Williams]

Well, film stocks in the '70s were supposed to be good for over 50 years and here it is only 30 years later and many properly stored prints of popular films have degraded noticeably.


Hi,

With respect film prints don't have a long life expectancy, just the negatives.

Stephen