How many DVDs required for Windows 8 backup?

1492 wrote:
Best to store DVDs upright, in moderate temps and in a relatively low humidity environment, away from UV light sources.

DVD recordable life spans have been estimated to be from 15-40+ years(80%) from accelerated life testing, depending on quality of discs and recording. Less than 15 years for 20% of DVD-R/DVD+R. DVD-RW discs recorded the longest lifetime of about 30-45+ years. Both according to the OSTA.

Good info. Thanks. I guess the fact I'm visiting humid Florida isn't going to do my DVD's any good. :B Will be heading west for drier air in a few months.

ChopperBill wrote:
Cd,s are going the way of the floppy, Zip drives and the VCR .

wow... not many people around that even know what zip drives were...

Cd,s are going the way of the floppy, Zip drives and the VCR .

Best to store DVDs upright, in moderate temps and in a relatively low humidity environment, away from UV light sources.

DVD recordable life spans have been estimated to be from 15-40+ years(80%) from accelerated life testing, depending on quality of discs and recording. Less than 15 years for 20% of DVD-R/DVD+R. DVD-RW discs recorded the longest lifetime of about 30-45+ years. Both according to the OSTA.

What would cause a DVD to degrade over time? Would it be climate, magnetic fields? Or what?

mr. ed wrote:

I'm guessing a thumb drive may be a safer storage alternative, but that's an educated guess.

IMO, DVD/Bluray is still the best medium for archiving and permanent storage as long as carefully handled. They make specialized archive recordable media for long life storage.

Next would be SSD drives which have dropped in price substantially. Not much difference in pricing to USB flash drives. They're more reliable than HDs as they are non-mechanical, and as storage media, read/write limits are not really an issue. Plus, MTBF ratings @1,000,000 hours vs HD typically 20,000-50,000+ hours.

Next would be USB flash drives which are adequate for backup storage, but would be hesitant for use as archiving. It's been reported that solid state drive manufacturers tend to reserve their best memory chips from wafers for use in SSD, and port less reliable memory for flash drives and smartphones. I wouldn't consider flash drives to be as reliable as SSD.

Finally, HD's are the least reliable source as they are mechanical, and among the most common devices to fail in a computer besides power supply. However, they are adequate for use as backup storage. Definitely, not for archiving. Backup meaning that at least 2 copies of a file exist.

with the low price for them, why not back up on DVDs and also on a thumb drive?
bumpy

I'm currently backing up my Win8 laptop while writing this on my old XP machine. I got a great buy on DVD's at Radio Shack (10 for $3 + change). I was going to buy a 64GB thumb drive but Walmart was sold out and other vendors wanted $30 to $100 for one. I'm using only 3 DVD's for backup (that's about .90 for the whole backup).

I'm guessing a thumb drive may be a safer storage alternative, but that's an educated guess.

On edit: each DVD held 4.7 GB. That being the case, I could have gotten by with a much lower capacity thumb drive if I chose to do so. Oh well, live & learn. :)

I do have an external hard drive that I salvaged from a previous laptop. I'm already using that for other purposes. IIRC it holds about 32 GB. I like the moderator's suggestion of using a high capacity thumb drive. I just might go that route. Thanks to all who've responded.

BTW, I'm enjoying learning this new OS. All I knew previously was XP. Windows 8 is quite a different animal!

I was going to suggest getting an external USB drive to do the backup, but 1775 beat me to it. I agree with him. Backing up to an external hard drive makes a lot of sense to me... been doing it for years.

Also, I do my backups with DriveImage XML. That is free software, I've used it for years on many computers, and it has always worked when I've needed to restore an entire image or just pull a file or two off an archive backup. With a 2TB external disk drive, you can have many versions of your backup.

I would recommend not making a full back up to DVDs either.