So far I've filled 11 DVDs and have only gotten about half the stuff on the F drive backed up. 27 remain un-backed; 25 have been backed up. But I'm going to go back up a few more series before I call it a day. Mostly, I'm going back to do the stuff that's in my folder of torrents I took down when the stuff was licensed. (I know I shouldn't worry about that; in fact I should delete it and go buy the commercial DVDs. But lots of this stuff isn't worth buying. *cough*High School Girls*cough* And besides, my old "back up everything and delete nothing" instincts have been shifted into high gear. It's almost an OCD with me at times: NEVER DELETE OR RECORD OVER ANYTHING. *sigh*)
The nice thing about this is that I can fit about 26 episodes on a single disk, providing they haven't been encoded by morons or in some inefficient format. The Pretty Cure eps, for example, should have taken about two DVDs but instead took three because the files are all over 230 MB. I don't get why, since many of the files I have with similar quality all around weigh in under 200 MB each...
But oh well.
It would be nice if there was a backup solution which didn't involve lots of blank DVDs, though. I remember that I used to be able to back my hard drives up to a single tape; of course, that was when I had 400 MB per volume. These days, high-capacity tape drives are a bit spendy: $800 for a 500 GB tape drive. Yes, I spent $600 for the computer and $800 for crash recovery....
Hell, the cleaning cartridge alone is $50. Jesus.
Anyway, with dual-layer DVDs still fetching over $1 apiece--I saw 'em on sale at Best Buy in today's ad, $29 for a 20-disk spindle--I'm not about to use them when single-layer disks are running about $0.50 each.
The other day I had a look at a box of floppies at work. $13 for 40 of them. Remember when a single 5.25" single-sided floppy cost $5? That was in 1982, when you could buy a really nice car for $9,000. Cripes. Twenty-five years later, I won't buy a disk that stores fifty thousand times as much data that costs like 5% of the old floppy disk price in adjusted dollars, because it costs too much?
This 21st century is a place of wonder. Of course, the floppy was reusable and the dual-layer DVD+R disk is not. But still...
But I am still left without the security blanket of knowing that I have backed up the literal hundreds of gigabytes of anime I've downloaded--and so here I am, on a damp but warm Sunday afternoon, sitting at the computer, cleaning my desk and making backup DVDs.
I would prefer just to throw a tape into the tape drive, hit "run complete backup", and take a nap, but unfortuantely I have to do it the hard way--and so I'm going back to work now.